Horse Sense
by LogicMouse
Summary: When deadly violence invades the peaceful realm of Equestria, Celestia calls in a favor from a fellow ruler. Can Harry Dresden, wizard and Winter Knight, save the day, or will he destroy the delicate balance he was summoned to preserve?
1. Chapter 1

The Dresden Files is copyright Jim Butcher. This story is licensed under the Creative Commons as derivative, noncommercial fiction.  
>My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is property of Hasbro Inc. No copyright infringement is intended.<p>

[NB for Dresden Files reference: This story takes place a moderate period of time after the events of _Ghost Story_, (probably after _Cold Days_ as well, hard to tell yet) but also assumes (approximately) the events of LogicMouse's earlier fanfic, "New Car Smell." (Which can be found by Googling "nine muses the archive".) Because she liked them, so there. So Clyde, the fancy new tools, and Harry's new coat are in no way canon, but we're going to use them anyway. But you can still read this story without knowing anything more about that one.]

**New Business**

I was feeling unreasonably happy with my lot in life as Clyde and I roared into the parking lot of my new office that morning. I slid the flashy white Charger into one of the half-dozen spots in the microscopic area of pavement that I was pleased to call my own. He shut off his engine analogue—or at least cut the sound effects—and I swung open the door and got out almost before we'd completely stopped moving. It was a gorgeous late spring day, the sun was shining, my new office was finally renovated to my liking, and I thought I had glimpsed someone standing by the front door waiting for me, so I might even have a paying customer.

Don't get me wrong; if you're going to be stuck being a kept man, you could do _way_ worse than being beholden to one of the faerie queens. As ruler of all the Winter fae, the resources Mab has at her fingertips are almost unimaginable, and if you've got even a little bit of leverage against her, she'll go along with some surprisingly big requests simply because it's less trouble than saying no. But still. It'd be a wonderful feeling to be supplying my own pocket money again for a change, not to mention making paying my taxes significantly less tricky. The IRS doesn't appreciate it when you try to claim thousands of dollars worth of income earned from "Consultant work for the Queen of Air and Darkness."

I shrugged to settle the armored leather duster more comfortably across my shoulders, hefted my newly finished staff in my right hand and swung the car door closed with my left—offering Clyde an affectionate pat as I did—then turned to pace around the sidewalk to the front of the building.

As much as I had loved the Maltese Falcon-esque charm of my old office in the corner of a high-rise building in downtown Chicago, it was a simple fact that the entire _building_ no longer existed as a direct result of my decision to put my office there. As far as I knew, no innocents had died in the explosion that destroyed the building, but that could easily have been otherwise. And even without any loss of life, the loss of property, records and livelihood to hundreds of innocent people was not something I could entirely forgive myself for.

So the new place was significantly different. It was a freestanding structure for one thing, on a quiet corner at the edge of two and a half blocks of fading business district in an otherwise residential neighborhood. But the whole thing wasn't much bigger than my old office had been. I smiled up at the gleaming white walls, miniature towers, and crenellations of the structure—not even thirty feet on a side—stretching out my wizardly senses to brush gently against the newly finished wards that coated its ceramic and steel walls like an extra, invisible layer of paint, and resisted the impulse to start whistling. Nothing good could come of that.

I swung around the front corner into view of the theoretical client. The silver charm bracelet with a dozen tiny shields that hung around my left wrist thrummed softly with the energy I had begun to run through it, and the spirals of carved symbols that curled around my staff—inlaid with three distinct types of metal—gleamed just a little brighter than the sunny day could account for. A would-be client would be wonderful, but to be honest, the way _my_ life tends to go, she was more likely a would-be assassin.

The young woman who stood on the sidewalk a few feet from my door was cute, in a nervously slender, coltish way. She was a bit under average height for a woman, almost definitely legal to drive, definitely not to drink. I couldn't quite decide whether they'd let her vote yet. She had loose, shoulder-length hair dyed a deep indigo and set off with a single pink and purple stripe that fell artlessly over one ear. Her clothes were an odd blend of nerdy-chic and goth-chic. On one hand, a white collared shirt topped with a lavender sweater vest straight out of some extra-cutesy boarding school; on the other, loose black cargo pants, pockets bulging, tucked into knee-high black boots whose boxy design and exaggerated elevator soles left them more suited for the big top than a stroll down main street. I guess those are fashionable these days, for folks who don't naturally brain themselves in doorways.

She had a huge, old leather-bound book tucked under one arm and no purse in sight, although those pockets most likely made up the cubic yardage for her. As I approached, I noticed there was something odd about her face. I did my best to study it without appearing to, and without meeting her eyes for too long. It's just not good business practice to allow unintentional soulgazes with potential clients. Especially when they haven't even offered to pay you yet.

Her chin was dainty and distinctly pointed, and her eyes—a vibrant purple I had previously thought only to be found on the heroines in Bob's romance novels—were just a bit larger than you normally see on people over the age of six. The combination gave her an exaggeratedly youthful, vulnerable appearance and combined with her apprehensive expression to set all my most archaic protective instincts a-jangle. I'd need to watch out for that, in case what she was going to lie to me about turned out to be deadly.

She straightened up when she saw me, hugging the tome closer to her chest and wobbling on those oversized heels to the point where she had to throw her free hand out to the side for balance. "Mister Dresden, sir?"

I gave her a warm smile, and came to a stop at well over arm's length from her, grounding the staff more-or-less innocuously between us. "That's me. And you are?"

"My name is Twilight Sp–er. Just call me Twilight." She blinked and tilted her head back to look me in the eye. I looked her in the hair stripe. Even with the platform heels, the top of her head hardly reached my collar-bone. "Wow. You're tall."

"Why yes, I'm tall." _Who are you weird little wonders?_ I managed to complete the thought in silence, for a change. Score one for the self-control of the broke-ass wizard. "You ever need something off the top shelf, you know who to call." That got a little laugh out of her, but didn't loosen the tension in her shoulders as much as I might have liked. "Are you in need of a private investigator?"

She coughed, shifting her weight and nearly stumbling over her shoes again. The heels made a sharp, oddly hollow tock against the concrete. "No. Actually. I need a wizard."

I grunted something that might almost have been a laugh. "Well, then you came to the right place. No point discussing important things out here, eh?" I turned away from her, up two little steps, and unlocked the Lexan-and-steel front door of my office with its simple logo in neat black lettering; "Harry Dresden, Wizard." She was almost certainly hiding something from me, but by this point my instincts were pretty sure that it wasn't murderous intent. Nevertheless, I opened the door quickly, muttering the wards around it from active burglar alarm to low key detection mode under my breath and giving the surprisingly heavy door a shove that was just enough to allow me to enter.

Under normal circumstances, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I love few things more than showing respect and courtesy to a lady, with things like paying for meals and holding open doors. But I've gotten to be pretty damned cynical over the last few years, and the door itself was in the nature of a test. I strode forward into the front room of the office, watching carefully in the dark-tinted mirror on the far wall for her reaction.

She stepped up to the closing door and pushed it open in a perfectly normal manner, looking very slightly miffed. She neither made an effort to avoid the door's steel frame nor showed any sign of discomfort or pain when her bare hand touched it. My tightly wound nerves loosened slightly. So. She was neither faerie nor fomor, neither of which can easily stand the touch of cold iron, including steel. Of course there were still a literally infinite number of nasty, inhuman things she _could_ be, but I had special reasons to worry about those two.

The frame of the mirror gave off a flash of soft, dull orange and green light for a split second as she stepped through the doorway. It was brief enough, dim enough, that you wouldn't likely notice if you weren't specifically looking. But I was, and it was more than enough to give me an idea of what I was dealing with.

I swept around the side of the desk, stopping to lean my staff in the corner and hang the heavy, white leather duster up on its specially reinforced coat hook. I had finished working the same defensive spells into it as my old duster had been laced with a few months ago, but after brief consideration had decided not to bother removing the bulky, mundane chain mail, kevlar, and ceramic armor that lined it. I could handle the weight fine these days, and I've never yet found myself in the position of having _too much_ protection.

I settled myself into the office chair behind my new desk, gesturing her into one of the two on the other side. My old office had been entirely furnished with hand-me-downs and Salvation Army finds; dark, creaky and comfortable. All the furniture in the new office was brand new, and even matched, if only because each piece was representative of the cheapest variation Ikea sold. It was the product of a compromise between myself and my 'design consultant'—also known as my fairy godmother, Lea. I'm still not sure why Mab assigned _her_ to help me get settled back in the real world, but I'd been surprised at the vehemence with which she'd insisted on upgrading my usually eclectic style. The place wasn't precisely _me_, but it was still a much closer fit than my luxurious apartment in the walls of Arctis Tor.

"So, Twilight–" I paused, frowning. "You don't look old enough to have hippie parents."

She gave me a blank look. "I'm sorry?"

I shook my head a little, and folded my hands on the desk. "Uh. Never mind. Mind wanders when you get to be my age. So. You find yourself in need of a wizard, eh? Tell me about it."

She licked her lips, briefly looking even more uncomfortable. "I was referred to you—by a rather roundabout method—but the last link told me to give you this, first thing." She wriggled around, reaching into one of the roomy pockets of her pants, and came out with a small, octahedral gemstone, deep purple in color, which she held out to me.

My eyes narrowed. So much for no fairy involvement. I reached out to accept the gem from her, deliberately brushing her fingers with mine in passing. Instantly, I felt a sharp sting like a big old static shock, but indicating in this case the same thing as the green flash had. The girl flinched and lost her grip on the gem, but I caught it neatly, frowning again.

I reached out to the gem with a delicate tendril of will, and was rewarded with the cool, calculating tone of Mab's voice resonating in my head as if my skull were a struck bell. _The problem this child brings you is of interest to me. Solve it for her, my Knight._

The crystal dissolved into a scattering of purple fairy dust and I frowned, shaking off the lingering resonance of the queen's words and trying to think.

Stranger and stranger. The girl currently massaging her shocked hand and glaring at me was a mortal practitioner, and an unusually strong one—maybe close to as strong as I had been at her age—but she came bearing a message token from my boss, Queen Mab. And she wasn't from around here. The orange flash had said that she was under the influence of some sort of shapeshifting effect, although not an innately malevolent one, like a Hexenwulf belt. That would have been red.

"Don't tell me you weren't expecting that," I growled.

"What? No, what– That hurt!" she said, shaking out her zapped hand with a puzzled frown. My brows rose.

"You've really never touched another practitioner before?" I said, probably sounding more than a little skeptical. "Wait, are you here for training? Because I don't exactly have time to take on another apprentice these days." Or any desire for one. My track record in that department was less than stellar.

"Wha–No!" she snapped, sounding insulted enough to put my back up. Hey, full wizard of the White Council over here, more than qualified to teach anybody I choose about magic. "Sel–I already have the most wonderful teacher possible, thank you!" She clutched the book more closely to her chest, staring at me warily for a moment. "What's a practitioner?"

My jaw dropped. "Wizard. Witch. Magician. Magus. Shaman. Miracle worker? What do _you_ call someone who can tap into the essential forces of the universe?"

"Um. Okay." She shrugged slender shoulders from behind her book shield and said apologetically, "We just say they have a gift for magic. It's not that big a deal."

I took a deep breath to smooth out my irritation at this half-incomprehensible conversation before it could develop into a full-on angry outburst. "Okay. So have you never touched someone else who had a gift for magic?"

"Sure, plenty of times! But nothing like _that_ ever happened!"

"You're _really_ not from around here, are you?"

"Not even _close_." Her response was instantaneous and relieved. "This place is so weird. And this disguise is just…I can't even put it into words. _So_ uncomfortable."

I grunted. "We're safe enough here. You can drop it."

"Oh, I–I can't. Celestia put it on me before I left."

"Celestia." I nodded thoughtfully. "Your teacher?" She bobbed an eager nod. "She's not human, is she?"

"No, of course not!"

Right, neither was the kid, obviously. Wrong question, Harry. "Sorry. Celestia isn't a _mortal_, is she?"

Twilight shook her head, looking mollified at that. I nodded. Maybe the teacher was the fae in the picture. That could explain Mab giving the girl a token promising my help, as well as how the teacher could transform her student without blatantly breaking one of the Laws of Magic. Faeries tap into the same kind of magic that we mortals do, but they don't seem to be subject to the Laws in the same way. They have laws of their own, instead. Far twistier, more incomprehensible, and therefore more dangerous laws.

"Right. You and your mentor are from somewhere in the deep Nevernever. I'm assuming the problem is back home?"

She sobered. "Something is killing p–people along the border, and three of my friends disappeared when we tried to stop it. Celestia says we just aren't built to handle this. Her contact thinks that you are." She narrowed her eyes and peered at me, apparently trying to read the truth of the claim off of my face.

I scowled, shaking my head. If the situation called for some creative mayhem and magical head-busting, then it was pretty well guaranteed to be more up my alley than that of this bookish little girl. Still. The whole set-up was creeping me out. If it weren't for Mab's directions, I might have turned down the job on general principle, but while I may have come to a sort of wary detente with my new boss, outright flaunting of her orders was _not_ on the menu at this point in time.

"Yeah, okay. No point dragging our feet." I stood and gathered up my coat, tossing one wistful glance at the coffeemaker before I swung it on and took up my staff again. "I take it you can provide transportation?" She nodded firmly. "What facilities do you need?"

She licked her lips once. "Just some flat open space. A circle a little wider than you are tall."

I nodded. "Come on. We can use the parking lot."

I flipped the closed sign, locked the door and returned the wards to high alert, then led her around to the back of the building, where Clyde waited patiently. I gestured to the bare, recently resurfaced asphalt just past him and stood back to watch, sticking my hands in my pockets.

Twilight pulled chalk, candles and a half-dozen props of various description out of her cargo pants' capacious pockets and set to work, carefully referring to several pages in the book each step of the way. She started with a basic circle, maybe seven feet across, measuring it out with a piece of string held at the center point to get it as even as possible. I smiled, remembering a time when I was green enough to bother with something like that. My eyeballed circles are pretty darned accurate these days, and I have the skill and concentration not to worry too much about the loss of efficiency caused by a little imperfection. Still, it was good to see someone trying to keep up the standards.

Once the circle was laid out, she filled in a pair of inverted triangles—the shape of a traditional Star of David—and laid her six focus items just outside the circle, at each point of the figure. Then she began carefully copying a long piece of text out of her book along the inside curve of the circle, and then across each interior line. The alphabet was unfamiliar to me; blocky and repetitive, somehow reminiscent of cuneiform but maybe based on a different shape of stylus.

I peered at her foci while I waited for her to finish, and found myself metaphorically scratching my head. When I set up a serious piece of thaumaturgy like this, I use props representing the five senses, the four physical elements, and the three human aspects of mind, spirit and body. I seriously could _not_ figure out what Twilight's props could be intended to represent. There were only the six of them, for starters, and a more eclectic bunch I'd never seen. A clear crystal prism sat across from a deeply toned purple jewel—amethyst, I thought, though I'm no gemologist—and next to a fresh, perfect, bright red apple. They were joined by a high quality brass astrolabe, a carefully preserved dried wildflower and—most confusing of all—a bright pink polka-dotted party horn.

I sighed and backed carefully away from her workspace, to lean against Clyde's back fender with my arms crossed. Oh, well. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Once the girl had her ritual space prepared, and six white candles lit at the corners of the figure, she knelt down in front of the astrolabe, weight neatly balanced on her knees and toes, hands resting loosely on top of her thighs. "Once the gate is open, we'll need to go through fairly quickly, so be ready, Mr. Dresden," she murmured.

"Roger Wilco, hon." I said. She threw a puzzled look at me over her shoulder, and I hurried to add, "I understand." She nodded, settled herself again, eyes closed, and sank into the focused calm required of a big working. I lifted my hips away from Clyde's warm fender and muttered, "Time for off-road mode, Clyde. You heard the client, we don't want to waste time."

I hadn't finished flapping my jaws before I felt a brief, focused flash of magic from behind me, and Clyde returned to his natural (or at least preferred) form. The huge grey horse turned around and leaned his chin on my shoulder, hooves clopping gently against the asphalt.

Twilight startled at the first tock of hoof on pavement, twisting around so violently that she nearly fell over onto her carefully drawn circle. Her eyes wide, she windmilled in place until she could regain her feet. "Where did you come from?" she gasped.

Clyde's warm, slightly rotten-smelling breath rolled across my face and chest, and I reached up to scratch his forelock, wrinkling my nose at the smell. "Just an associate of mine. Twilight, this is Clyde. Clyde, Twilight. Be nice."

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Clyde," Twilight said, and bowed slightly, for all the world as if she expected a reply. Well, I suppose one never knows for sure when dealing with wizards.

My mount just snorted heavily, probably objecting to the restriction.

Clyde looks more or less like a draft horse, complete with broad muscular haunches and a back _I_ need to tilt my chin up to see, but he's really a steed of the Winter fae, and a very old and powerful one at that. His dental cutlery rivals a freaking grizzly bear's, and as far as I know he only eats the flesh of other faerie creatures. And probably mortal creatures too, if I'd let him get away with it.

Clyde and I have a kind of detente going on too. He does what I expect of him and I don't bind him into absolute, abject slavery. I could. It's apparently one of the perks of my new position. One of many I have no intention of taking advantage of.

"He's not much of a conversationalist," I said, once the silence had had a chance to settle.

"Oh."

"Time's a wasting, eh?"

"Oh! Yes. Sorry." After one more searching glance at Clyde, the girl finally turned back to her diagram.

It didn't take more than about five minutes for the indigo girl to get her act together. Purple-white lines of light rose up from the six corners of her design, arcing in to meet at the center point of the circle, then flaring into a solid dome of lightning-colored light. I stretched out my wizard's senses to examine the construct. The flavor was more… pastel than I was used to, but the basis was very similar to one of my Nevernever gates.

As soon as it had settled in, Twilight wobbled to her feet, even more off-balance than before. I closed the distance and was gently stabilizing her elbow before she could fall, and she glanced up at me with a combination of surprise and gratitude. I nodded, and let go as soon as I was sure she wasn't going to topple over.

She gave a sharp nod of her own, and used a brief two-handed gesture—a little reminiscent of a conductor calling the orchestra to order—to gather up her book and focus items with a tidy little whisk of a force evocation. She was stepping through the gate before she'd even gotten them all put away.

"All-righty, Clyde. Our turn." And I started to stride through the gate after her when a shrill, protesting neigh rang out behind me. I turned with one hand nearly touching the surface of the dome to see Clyde, nose lowered to the level of his knees, shaking his head and neck violently back and forth and backing slowly away from me. "What the hell, boy? We need to go. You've used portals with me plenty of times. This is no different." In answer, he threw his head back, baring those tremendous fangs—the ones he'd tried to take my face off with the first time we met—and screamed an even more impassioned denial, then started bouncing stiffly on his forelegs as though about to rear. At my back, I felt the purple gateway beginning to waver already. "Okay, okay, fine. You don't have to come. Just stay here, stay camouflaged and don't hurt anybody without a really good reason." He fell back to all fours and dropped his head, snorting a more characteristically ill-tempered acknowledgement.

There was no time to figure out what was bugging him just now, so I turned to hurry through the portal after my client. But Clyde wasn't generally an alarmist, so I started prepping my shield bracelet again while I did it. Better safe, etc.

When I passed the horizon of the spell's dome, I found myself not within another landscape but just on the inside of the diagram, whose light had changed from a bright, pure, purple-white to a gaudy rainbow of hues, swirling and shifting along lines that reflected its original, six pointed pattern. The girl waited for me at the far edge of the space, clutching her tome with an air of impatience. "Good," she said as soon as she saw me come through, and turned to step over the circle's edge and out. I followed quickly, ducking my head to avoid touching the arc of magic too soon.

_Now_ we found ourselves at our destination, or so I supposed. This time I stepped through the effervescent curtain of magic into bright afternoon sunlight just a touch gentler than what shone on my office today, and the broad open space of what could only be a grand hall. The room around us echoed the basic shape of Twilight's transportation dome, but on the scale of a small sports stadium, decorated in a gold-accented rainbow of pastel colors. The curving walls were almost entirely composed of huge panels of stained glass, each a tranquil if oversimplified outdoor scene dominated by a different hue. The floor was patterned like a huge checkerboard, and what wall space there was between windows was shaded an oddly restful grey-violet color.

We had arrived at the edge of an inlaid golden circle in the exact center of the room, and we were entirely alone, at least for the moment. I heard Twilight sigh behind me, and murmur, "Oh, it's good to be home." I turned to make some comment in response, but the instant I saw her, the words fell right out the bottom of my brain, along with the tattered remains of my sanity.


	2. Chapter 2

**New Vistas**

I've mentioned before that the Nevernever is just stupendously big. As far as I know, it's big enough to encompass a near endless variety of worlds, sentiences and civilizations, along with every concept of an 'other' realm or afterlife that's ever been dreamed of anywhere. But until that moment, I'd had no true grasp of just exactly how _right_ I was. The sight that met my eyes when I turned back to the young lady who had brought me here was so unlikely, so utterly, mind-bendingly impossible that my brain simply ceased working for a long moment, seizing up as solidly as the rusted-out engine of a 1968 Ford Bronco mistakenly started with no oil in it.

You see. While I have run across many strange (and usually terrifying) sights in my career as a wizard, this one was so far out of the realms of my experience, and so difficult to grasp, as to give me a perfect—if fortunately fleeting—sense of the true vastness of the multiverse I'm lucky enough to inhabit. And as a much wiser and funnier man than I once pointed out, "If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it _cannot_ afford to have is a sense of proportion."

So it took me a few seconds before I could drag my jaw up off the floor. "Y-y-y-y-you," I started. "Y-y-y-you're a-a-a-a." She stared at me blankly. _"A cartoon!"_ I screeched.

"A what?" asked the not-quite three-dimensional image before me. If I were to attempt to describe her now, I would end up using much the same phrases as when I first saw her standing nervously by the front door of my office; thin, coltish figure, dark blue hair with a brighter stripe, pale skin, overlarge deep violet eyes, but the meaning of the words would be entirely misrepresenting the reality (if I could call it that) of the being I now faced.

My knees went weak and I plopped onto my butt on the floor, legs sticking straight out in front of me, while I stared up at a thick-outlined, simply shaded caricature of the girl I had just met. I blinked a few times, rubbing idly at the bottom of my chin where it had been abraded by the cold marble tile. The importance of that minor discomfort sank in as slowly as an ill-fated lunch at a carnival. I felt my eyes drawn down, rather against my will, to take in my own appearance. I reached out one hand and poked cautiously at my leg. It still _felt_ the same—slightly rough texture of new jeans over warm and appropriately yielding flesh—but what I _saw_ was nothing but a smooth sweep of unvarying blue, highlighted by a darker border where the pant curved out of sight; no more than a simple approximation of denim. I twisted my knee side to side, morbidly fascinated by the way that the bordering line held constant at the edge of view even though the shape and position of my leg shifted with the motion. "And so am I."

I held up a hand—my left—noting the same effect of a simple, single-color fill, edged with a slightly darker shade of peach outlining each finger. More of the same darker shade squiggled across the palm and back of my hand in cartoonish reflection of my fading burn scars. "This is just so messed up," I muttered.

I might have just sat there for hours staring at myself, but I was distracted by a new arrival. She was coming into the hall from the top of a stairway a couple of stories up. I scrambled to my feet, coat swaying around me, clutching at the sturdy length of my staff and shaking out my shield bracelet again in preparation to meet any possible threat.

The creature that met my eyes was almost as unbelievable as my own newly reduced level of definition. In form it was vaguely like a horse—if one drawn by an artistically capricious tweener who'd never actually seen a horse up close—with an elegantly arching neck, slender flanks and dainty-muzzled face dominated by almost ridiculously outsized eyes. Its mane and tail were broad, gently streaming banners striped in a delicate pastel rainbow. A long, elegant spiral of pure white horn like a narwhal's protruded from the center of its forehead, and broad but probably non-functional wings spread slightly from its back with every dainty step down the stairs. Oh, and it was wearing a crown, as well as a broad gem-studded golden pectoral.

The (Unisis? Pegacorn? What the heck was I even supposed to call this thing?) creature had just descended to the halfway point of the grand staircase when Twilight followed my gaze up to it and immediately sank down into a bow. It might have been quite a graceful maneuver if she hadn't completely lost her balance halfway down and wound up in a face-first sprawl on the cold tile floor. "Oh, Princess Celestia!" she called out, scrambling up to her hands and knees. "I found him, just like your friend said!"

The newcomer came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs and looked over the two of us. I raised an eyebrow and looked back. Celestia inclined her head in a regal acknowledgement to each of us, and Twilight struggled back to her feet. "Queen Mab is not precisely a friend of mine, my dear student," the horse-like being said in a warm, honeyed alto not even slightly degraded by her lack of human lips. "Only a peer, and occasional ally. I hope that you were on your best behavior when speaking to her?"

"Oh, yes, Princess!" Twilight nodded energetically, giving off the same near-desperate, puppy-like eagerness to please that Molly had tended toward in her first few months of study with me. I fought off a smile, watching the horse-princess, whose expression seemed more amused and tolerant than anything. "Can I get out of this awful disguise now?"

"Of course, my dear Twilight, in just a moment. After all, _you_ are no longer the one in need of a disguise." Celestia turned her attention to me and continued, "Thank you for coming to our aid so swiftly, Sir Knight."

I nodded to her, leaning more heavily on my staff, "You're welcome, your Highness. Mab seemed to think your situation was rather urgent. I'll do what I can."

"In aid of that, Sir Dresden, will you allow me to disguise you, for the duration of your stay here? My subjects have never seen a human before, and I would prefer that your presence disturb them no more than absolutely necessary."

I frowned at that, and didn't answer right away. Clearly, Celestia meant to work some sort of transformation on me; the inverse of whatever she'd done to Twilight that left her so awkward and uncomfortable. I've had my shape messed with a couple of times in the past, and the experiences were not precisely what I'd call pleasant. On the other hand, being chased out of every town and village here by a mob of locals with torches and pitchforks before I could ask question one wouldn't be particularly pleasant either. I needed more information before I could willingly go along with something like that. So I concentrated for a moment, and extended my wizardly senses toward the princess.

I was instantly glad that I hadn't gone straight for my Sight. The immediate impression that Celestia gave off was one of warm, steady light and immense, slow-shifting power. She was no mortal creature, never mind her form, and as she had said, she was truly a peer of Mab's, if perhaps—perhaps—a lesser one. I sighed through my nose and admitted to myself that I was already in kind of a bind here. "You'll return me to my natural form when it's time for me to leave? None the worse for wear?" I asked.

She bowed her head in stately acquiescence. "You will suffer no harm at my hooves, Sir Knight. I so swear it." She wasn't a faerie as such, but she was one of the powers of the Nevernever, and all of them that I've read about, heard of, or met have taken oaths and words of honor _very_ seriously. She probably did too.

"Is it really necessary?"

"I believe it is."

I ground my teeth together, wishing briefly that I'd taken Injun Joe up on those lessons, so I could take care of this myself. "Fine."

"Thank you." In a moment, a soft white light gathered around her ivory horn, and with a tilt of her chin, she waved it past the two of us in a sort of modified magician's wand flourish. I braced myself for pain, as I had experienced before, but all I felt was a wobbly, oozing softness in my flesh, and a brief sense of disorientation as my knees weakened and I fell once more to the cold tile floor.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment to block out the whirling walls, and the first thing I noticed as my senses steadied was that I was no longer holding my staff. I didn't remember losing my grip on it. I groped around on the floor, blinking to get my eyes back under control, but couldn't see or feel it anywhere. And my hand wasn't working right. I focused, finally, and gaped in panic at my right hand, seeing nothing there but a smooth sweep of unvarying white 'flesh'—bordered in pale grey and ending at a flat, utterly finger-free surface, like an empty coat sleeve. _"Shit!"_

I scrambled up off the floor, but didn't get as far as I was expecting, merely pulling myself up onto all fours before discovering that my legs no longer bent properly. Nor were their flat, narrow tips appropriate for managing a bipedal position. They weren't all that great for a quadruped either, as I discovered when an injudicious shift dumped me back onto my rump, legs splayed awkwardly in front of me.

"Dear God, I'm a horse!" I babbled, craning my—long, weirdly flexible—neck around to examine the loaner look from every angle I could manage. "An anatomically _incorrect_ horse!" I screeched, my voice most of an octave higher than it should be. I closed my eyes again, fighting to get my sudden, terrified panting under control. _Calm down, Harry. It's only temporary. She promised. You're going to be fine._ I wasn't much interested in listening, but pure habit of years slowed my breathing and brought the incipient panic under control. "Jeez, I know I haven't used 'em much lately, but that's no reason to take them away entirely," I muttered. There. Snark glands relocated, I felt much better.

"Of course not, Sir Knight," came Celestia's warm, calm voice from the other side of my eyelids. "You are a unicorn pony. It's the only reasonable disguise for a magic worker of your skill."

I opened my eyes. Then I crossed them, trying to get a look at my own forehead. It didn't work. I moved my head around some, slowly and then faster, trying to tell by weight whether there was anything extra up there. Finally, irritated, I just let go of some of the aching tension in my muscles and shook my head and neck as hard as I could. Skin and tendons flopped back and forth with the motion, vertebrae loosened, and a short brush of coarse mane flapped against my face and the sides of my neck like tiny, stinging drops of rain. When I was done, I just let my chin hang down, feeling inexplicably more at ease with the world.

"Wow," I said. "No wonder Clyde does that so much."

Someone giggled nearby. I scowled up at another simplistic equine form now standing in the shadow of the Princess. She was maybe half her mentor's height. Her mane and tail were the same purple-and-pink striped indigo as Twilight-girl's hair had been, her coat was the lavender of her sweater vest, and she had a cute little nubbin of a lavender-colored horn peeking out from the middle of her forelock. I snorted at her in disgust. "Oh give me a break. You can't tell me you adapted any better the first time." Oh, good. Despite the AWOL anatomy, my voice had settled back to its usual baritone.

"Indeed. It was quite some time before she was able to stand on her own," Celestia murmured, giving the smaller unicorn a mildly quelling look.

"Sorry, Sir Dresden," Twilight said, a laugh still livening her tone. "You just reminded me of Rainbow Dash after she crashed into the watering trough."

"Please," I said, carefully beginning to wobble to my feet again, "Just call me Harry. It's simpler."

"Oh." Twilight gave her teacher and me a concerned look, "If you're going to blend in, maybe we should think of something else to introduce you as."

"What?" I snapped, losing concentration and almost going down again. These stupid hooves were _slippery_ on marble tile.

"Well, 'Dresden' just isn't a pony name," she said, apologetically. I scowled and didn't answer, focused on trying to keep my balance while turning my eyes inside out.

Celestia cleared her throat gently and put in, "You're going to hurt yourself if you continue like that, Sir Harry. Might I suggest making use of the mirror over there?" She nodded elegantly toward the wall to my left. I was beginning to suspect that she did everything elegantly.

With a grumpy snort, I set off over the broad treacherous swath of completely unobstructed floor to the wall-mounted mirror she had pointed out. It's not as though I particularly like staring at my own reflection—I'm not Carlos, after all—but I did need to figure out how to walk around like this somehow, and it would be useful to have an idea of the impression I'd be giving people here. First impressions can be very important. Ask any stage performer.

The figure in the mirror, when I finally wobbled close enough to look into it, was taller than Twilight but not quite as tall as the princess. I was a good bit bulkier, with a coat the same obnoxiously bright white as my much-reviled replacement duster. My tail was long, shaggy, and brown, the equally dark mane along my neck roached short with a longer forelock drooping down above my eyes in vague imitation of my usual hairstyle. And sure enough, a pure white, spiraled horn poked out from under the hair, somewhat longer than Twilight's but nowhere near as elegantly sweeping as Celestia's. Hmph. Whatever.

I shifted around, practicing the management of four feet at once. The other times I'd found myself transformed, the movement and sense of my replacement body had felt much more natural. Instinctive, even. Despite the learning curve, I thought I preferred it this way. It left me feeling more like myself.

I was just starting to get comfortable—lifting and placing my legs in imitation of as many different horse-gaits as I could recall off the top of my head—when a turn drew my attention to a splotch on my backside. I twisted around to get a better look, briefly found myself chasing my own retreating rump as my back legs tried to keep their distance from my front, then finally managed to pin it down by suddenly switching directions and then freezing in place.

Twilight's giggle was even louder this time. "I'm sorry," she bubbled, "But I was wrong. He reminds me of Pinkie Pie!" I would have glared at her but I'd just gotten a good look at my embellished butt and was too busy scowling furiously into the mirror. My transformation had apparently come with a free side of body art. Right on the center of my hip was a neat, simple tattoo of my wizard's staff, complete with a hint of bluish runes, crossed with—

"Why the hell is there a _hat_ on my ass?" I howled, "I _hate_ hats!" A movement in the mirror caught my attention and I looked up in time to notice my own expression. My oversized eyes were narrowed to dangerous slits, big horsy ears pinned down against my skull and a faint puff of visible steam came out of my undersized nostrils as I huffed in annoyance. I scowled at myself for a moment longer, but an inescapable conclusion was pounding away at my anger. My chest heaved. My knees shook. Finally I couldn't hold it in any longer.

I fell to the floor, laughing so hard I could barely breathe. It was all just too completely ridiculous, and I totally lost it for a couple of minutes, rolling around on the floor, kicking my feet in the air, pounding my "fists" against the tiles. Several times I started to wind down a little only to glance up at my image—or, once, at the boggled expressions of mistress and student watching me—and instantly lost it again.

I think I really only stopped in the end due to sheer exhaustion. "Heh. Heh, heh, heh," I chortled, wiping tears from the corners of my eyes with the back of one pastern. "Stars and stones but I'm _cute_!"

[[To see an illustration, check out LogicMouse's  
>deviantart scrapbook page, "Harry Flanks - 1" ]]<p>

In between my panting breaths, I caught Celestia's lady-like murmur. "I hate to say it, dear Twilight, but I'm afraid you have a point."

I had no idea what she meant, but that set me off again anyway, and somewhere beyond my own mirth I heard Twilight's bubbly giggle echoing mine. There might even have been a genteel and sophisticated suggestion of a chuckle from her teacher in there somewhere.

"Okay, okay," I panted finally, struggling back to my feet, and carefully averting my gaze from the mirror this time to avoid the oncoming hernia. I gave my head another good hearty shake, just to work out the kinks and help me settle down, then walked—almost steadily—back to my clients. "Fun's fun, but as I understand it, we have some serious work to do here."

Twilight may still have been fighting off the giggles, but the princess did me one better for sudden seriousness. "Indeed. Something terrible has emerged from the Everfree Forest and attacked several of my ponies' settlements. Some are missing, more are dead, and my subjects are simply not equipped to deal with this sort of threat."

"Can you be any more specific?" I asked. "_Something_ killing people leaves a whole lot of wiggle room."

Celestia frowned thoughtfully, then glanced down at the smaller unicorn pony. "Twilight Sparkle, perhaps you could go arrange transportation for you and our friend here back to Ponyville."

"But I–" Twilight glanced back and forth between us, a hurt expression crumpling her childlike face, but she didn't finish the protest. "Yes, Princess," she sulked instead, her whole body drooping noticeably. She made a perfunctory but surprisingly graceful bow to her ruler and slouched off out of the grand hall.

"Ah, well-trained apprentices," I said, watching her go. "Worth their weight in hen's teeth."

Celestia blinked, but got back on track pretty quickly. "While I can't say with any precision what the attackers were, Sir Knight, I know that there were more than a few of them. And they were…" She looked away uncomfortably and lowered her voice for the final word, "…predators."

I cocked my head at her, about to ask what the big deal was, when she continued in a much firmer voice. "Such creatures have no place in my lands. They should have no place in this world. I charge you, Sir Harry; destroy these attackers, discover what has brought them here, and _rid_ my world of it." By the end of the sentence her voice had taken on a bell-like, clarion tone, and I could feel the weight of her anger pressing against my skin like a hot blanket. My heart hammered wildly in my chest for a moment, and I found myself prudently lowering my eyes, and then mimicking Twilight's bow. Celestia might be a basically gentle being, but she had just made it clear that she was _not_ one I wanted to cross.

"I'll do my best for you, Princess," I said as I came back to my feet. Then I remembered something and looked around the big, bare room one more time. "Oh. Where's my stuff?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The things I was carrying before you did your little pony trick on me," I explained. "My coat, my staff?"

"Ah. They were incorporated into your new form, Sir Knight. That way you won't lose them."

"Oh." That could be a bit of a problem, from a spell-casting perspective. Oh, well. It would probably be easier and more productive to pump the apprentice for tips on how magic worked around here, rather than pestering the head of state. Besides, it should be slightly less embarrassing.

I had already turned to follow Twilight in search of our transportation when Celestia added, in a low, almost worried tone, "One other thing. You'll need Twilight to act as native guide, I know, but she is no more familiar with violent confrontation than the rest of my subjects." She hesitated and I looked back. Her lovely face looked sad and strained. "Please do all you can to keep it that way."

I considered for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Don't let the kid get her hands dirty. I'll do what I can."

As it turned out, our transportation was a shiny golden chariot drawn by a matched pair of white pegasi in romanesque helmets and breastplates. The two of them were big and sturdy-looking, at least compared to my companion, but I was taller, even without the pointy bit on top. I have no idea why that made me feel better, but there you go. Occasionally I can be just as illogical as anybody else.

The space within the chariot was adequate, but by no means roomy for the two of us, and Twilight and I ended up close enough together that our flanks occasionally touched as the drivers banked into a turn. That might have been in part because of the way I was desperately bracing all four of my legs as far apart as I could to keep from sliding out the open back. The little purple unicorn didn't seem particularly excited about the possibility. In fact, as soon as we leveled out, she shifted around and sat leaning against the front wall, hind legs crossed in front of her, to give me more room.

I scowled at her for a long moment. "How do you do that?"

"Do what, Sir Harry?"

"Sit like that. Horses just can't do that." I was trying to stay calm, but my feet simply didn't have much traction on the flat floor of the cart, and my question probably came out rather sharper than I intended.

"We're not horses. We're ponies," she said, as if that should explain everything. "You don't need to brace yourself like that, you know. Just hang on."

I readjusted a couple of my feet as they tried to slide across the smooth floor and scowled even harder. "What are you talking about? How can I hang on, I don't have hands!"

She looked puzzled. "Just–hold on. Like this." And she raised one foreleg, reaching out the flat tip of her hoof to me. Tensely, I raised my nearest foreleg and returned the gesture. As our hooves touched—palm to palm for lack of a better term—I felt a firm but gentle tugging sensation, like my skin was pressed up against a layer of honey or glue rather than the hard, smooth keratin I was expecting. She smiled fleetingly. "A hard surface is fine for walking most of the time, but how do you expect to _handle_ anything like that?"

"Oh. Um." That was just plain weird. Obviously this corner of reality had some very distinctive rules of operation. I had more learning to do than I'd realized. I focused my attention on the grip between us, trying to make myself hang on to Twilight as she was hanging on to me. I didn't know yet exactly how magic worked around here, but the way I learned it, magic is all about focus, intention and imagination, and I flatter myself that I'm passably good at it. I imagined the surface of my hooves becoming soft and sticky, like a gecko's feet or the suckers of an octopus. It took a moment, but then the sensation snapped into place, and I was hanging on to her hoof every bit as hard as she was holding mine. Plus, the three feet I still had planted on the floor of the chariot squished themselves into place like Play-Doh into a mold, and suddenly I was no longer in danger of sliding out and into empty air. "Ah! Much better."

Twilight gave me a shy smile and began to pull her hoof away, and I fumbled to let go of it without losing my grip on the floor. When she finally managed to pull free, she shook it daintily before crossing it over her chest. "You have quite a firm grip when you want to, Sir Harry. You should probably practice some more before you shake hooves with anyone else."

"Oh. I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't hurt you did I?"

"No, I'm fine. But if you want to blend in…"

"Uh. Yeah. That's going to be tough, isn't it?"

She nodded wordlessly.


	3. Chapter 3

**New Friends**

"You mind if I ask you some stupid questions?" I ventured, after an awkward silence.

"Go ahead, Sir Harry."

I frowned around at the hazy scenery below us, trying to decide where to start. "Is this a taxi or a private car? Do we tip the team when we get there? Do you even have money around here? Why is it so easy to tell that they're boys and you're a girl when everybody's anatomically incorrect?" I paused for breath and hesitated at the sound of her quiet laughter.

"It'll be easier for me to answer if you ask them one at a time," she said, eyes twinkling.

"Sorry. It's just so much to take in all at once. I feel like I've been dropped in the Mississippi without a paddle. Or a boat." I tightened my hooves' "grip" on the floor boards, as though I were flexing my toes in thick carpet, and worked to slow my breathing.

"It's okay, I'm here to help with all of that," the purple unicorn soothed. "Let's see: Not a taxi. The chariot is Celestia's, and the guard ponies work for her too. They don't expect to be tipped. Our current economic framework, as laid out by Secretary Smart Cookie the Earth Pony when Equestria was founded, is based on a standard exchange value for gold bits. So yes, we use money, but I'll cover your expenses. Consider yourself my guest." She paused to think for a moment. "You used that phrase before, and I'm not sure what you mean. As for telling colts and fillies apart, you just do. They look very different. Couldn't you easily tell boys from girls where you come from?"

"Well, sure, but that's—" I trailed off, unwilling to go on about body shape and secondary sexual characteristics while the cute cartoon pony stared at me. The males pulling our conveyance were bigger, their jaws more square, eyes smaller. All traits that subtly distinguish genders in humans too. I blinked. Just because you can't tell a mare from a stallion back home without checking the undercarriage, why should it be the same here? "Never mind. So what do you do when you need the little ponies' room?"

"Oh, do you—?" she asked.

"Not right now, just wondering."

"They're marked. Just let me know and I'll point you to one."

I nodded silently. That wasn't quite what I'd meant, but I decided that was another topic I wasn't interested in getting more explicit about with her. I'd figure things out on my own when the time came. "So, what is Celestia, exactly?"

She frowned at me. "What do you mean?"

"Well. You called her princess. Are her parents the rulers?"

Twilight laughed disbelievingly. "No, Celestia rules Equestria. She has for more than a thousand years. She's the one who raises the sun every day, and her little sister Luna raises the moon."

"Oh. Okay. That's—pretty impressive." But if Celestia had ruled for a limited length of time, then, "How—never mind." Something told me that line of questioning would only get me a headache. "Oh, here's an important one. Are there any local rules about how magic can and can't be used?"

"Ah," Twilight hesitated. "That could take a while."

She was still running through the ordinances when we began our final descent.

Faster than my stomach appreciated, our ride dropped down into the middle of a large, mostly circular area of open grass, surrounded by a gathering of insanely varied buildings. The majority of them were light colored, half-timbered and probably thatched—although there was no more visible detail to them than there was to me at the moment—but many were far more fanciful in style and color: everything from castle-like confections reminiscent of miniature Disneylands to something that looked more like a giant jester's cap than anything you'd want to walk inside of.

Dotted across the open space around us were little stalls like you see at farmers' markets, only about twice as cute. A large fountain gurgled and splashed to one side of us and to the other a single, carousel-like building—multistoried and accented in dark shades of pink—loomed overhead.

I followed Twilight out of the chariot, rubbernecking for all I was worth. Everywhere I looked, adorable little pastel ponies were going about their business; buying and selling, chatting and playing, hurrying by on some important errand or dallying at the edge of other ponies' conversations. Some had unicorn horns like my youthful guide, but most didn't, and didn't seem to notice the lack.

Twilight thanked our handsome cabbies and sent them off back where they came from. "We should probably get you off the street right away, Sir Harry. The fewer ponies see you, the fewer questions we'll have to answer."

"Very good point, Twilight. Lead on." I said. "Oh, and you should probably just skip the 'Sir' thing too. Still fewer questions." I raised a brow at her skeptical expression. "I won't take offense, I promise."

Nodding, she led me off, past the fountain and into a narrower way, lined with more of the disturbingly cute little houses. She didn't break into a trot or anything, but I got the impression that she was moving as quickly as she thought safe without drawing more attention than we'd avoid. My legs were much longer than hers, but I still wasn't used to working with four at a time, so I was glad not to push the pace any harder than that, just yet.

As we walked, I focused in on the individuals around us more, noticing among other things that everybody except the littlest kids—sorry, foals, I guess—had marks on their backsides, just like I did. Not the same mark. In fact, I didn't see any two marks the same, however hard I looked. There were some common themes, though. Many of the tattoos involved foodstuffs of one sort or another. Quite a few were simple representations of tools, or physical items, like scissors or a bolt of cloth. One lantern-jawed, buckskin colored hor–pony pulling a cart full of assorted metal goods had an anvil on his backside. I was taller than him, by a little bit, but he was much bulkier. I decided that I wouldn't want to wrestle him. He nodded politely to my guide as we passed each other, and she nodded back before hurrying on.

At the end of the block, as we entered a smaller open area dotted with more clusters of sweet little sales carts, my eyes were assaulted by a massive confection of a building. It stood right on the edge of the plaza, looming over everything like the prow of a great ship. I can only think to describe this architectural crime as an unholy cross between an oversized swiss chalet and the wicked witch's gingerbread house on steroids. Decorated by Mary Kay.

As I was staring blankly at the pink-and-chocolate monstrosity, I thought I heard someone gasp loudly just behind us, but when I turned to look, there was nobody there. I would have investigated further, but Twilight hadn't stopped and I was falling behind. I couldn't afford to lose track of my guide.

A right turn and another little street led us to our destination, which turned out to be…a freaking _tree_. I stopped dead in my tracks as Twilight walked calmly up to the door set in the base of its trunk and shook my head again. "You have got to be kidding me!" I muttered. It was a really _big_ tree, and it had windows, balconies, and flower boxes poking themselves out at every joint and branch, and even from areas that really should have been nothing but a mass of leaves. I winced at the headache I felt coming on, and told myself that the solution here was to stop thinking quite so much. _It works for them. Just go with it, Harry._ I sighed and followed my native guide into the tree house.

Now, I'm not one to worry a whole lot about hypothetical calamities. When you've been through as many real ones as I have, you start to get just a touch blasé about most situations. But if there's one thing that always freaks me out just a little, it's the thought of being caught inside a burning building. (Again.) Walking into a home that had been carved out of a single, living tree, set off my twitch-o-meter, big time. But it got worse. It wasn't a home. It was a _library_. Every single yard of wall space was covered in bookshelves, and the majority of the floor was covered in stacks and slides of recently used books.

Good grief. One spark and this place would go up like Fourth of July fireworks.

For the first time since my novel transmutation, I experienced something else that horses and their ilk do all the time: My skin twitched.

As a human being, you shiver sometimes. If someone touches you unexpectedly enough the area touched might almost seem to flinch away from the sudden contact on its own. This wasn't like that. For a brief slice of time, I was forcefully introduced to what biologists will tell you is the single largest organ in the body. My _entire skin_ just shuddered and rippled in horror, as though it were trying to run away without waiting for the rest of me.

"Gahh," I groaned, about the time it stopped. "That's just creepy."

"I'm sorry?" Twilight said, her voice low.

"Are we picking up some light reading for the trip, or what?" I asked.

Twilight gave me a puzzled look over her shoulder as she picked her way across the large drowning-in-paper hazard of a room. "I live upstairs. We'll need supplies for the journey into the forest, and I should let Spike know what's going on."

I nodded thoughtfully, following her. "Stairs?" I muttered to myself. _Sure. Why not. I suppose a pony who can cross her legs can manage stairs just fine._ Of course, I felt no such assurance about _myself_.

The cockeyed little stairway zig-zagged up behind yet another wall of books. I let Twilight get a few steps up before attempting them myself, so that the wild flailing I anticipated wouldn't knock her over as well. But although it felt even more awkward than walking around, I didn't find myself falling over or banging into anything. I just took it one leg at a time and made it to the top of the steps not terribly far behind her.

The spiraling, hollowed-out corridor opened into another chamber carved from the living heartwood of a tree that had to rival the TARDIS for its upside-down interior to exterior volume ratio. This one wasn't as wide as the library below, but it was slightly taller, with an open loft bedroom just above the entrance. The main floor contained a pleasantly open living space, built-in shelves full of dish-ware and knickknacks and a cheerfully crackling fire in a fireplace. "Oh, good grief," I grumbled. "Why not just call the fire department right now?"

"Huh?" The grunt didn't come from my guide, but from the vicinity of a wicker basket full of patchwork quilt resting in a corner near the fire. I looked over to see a head pop up from beneath the covers of what turned out to be someone's—or some_thing's_—bed. The head was purple, with big, frilly green ears and a darker green crest, and its oversized eyes opened very wide as it caught sight of me. "Whoa, Twilight, there's a stranger in here!" The little creature scrambled to free itself of the basket, eyes locked on me.

For my part, I backed up a couple of steps, and tried to raise my left hand to ready a shield, as I generally do in a dangerous situation. You can imagine how well _that_ worked out. I instantly lost my balance and thumped down on my backside, my blunt, undecorated foreleg poised in front of me to do…well nothing much.

In reaching for magic to protect myself, I discovered a really unpleasant fact. While I could still sense the magical field of the world out there, my usual attempt to draw it in fell completely flat. It felt like trying to suck in soda through a pinched-shut straw. "Crap!" I snarled. Should have focused on the important things on the trip, doofus, like how the heck does magic _work_ around here?

No time to worry about that now. I just had to keep my focus on the possible threat as the creature from the cutesy basket stood up to its full maybe-two-foot height, rubbing at its eyes just like a sleepy child.

"Oh! Spike, it's okay!" Twilight called from the other side of the room. "He's the help Princess Celestia sent me to find." She hurried back over, stopping about halfway between us. As Spike dropped his hands to his sides I lowered my hoof, feeling just a little like an idiot. "Spike, this is S–uh, Harry. Harry, meet my number one assistant, Spike!"

I heaved myself up off the ground and approached the little critter. "Pleased to meet you, Harry!" he piped, in a voice that reminded me vaguely of my fairy friend, Toot Toot, while not actually sounding anything the same. "So you're going to get the other girls back and set everything to rights, huh?"

I checked my balance, and offered Spike a hoof to shake. "Same here, Spike. I hope I can help." His knuckle-less little fingers wrapped warmly around the end of my leg, and I managed a gentle return grip as he gave it a firm shake. "If you don't mind my asking," I ventured, "What are you, exactly?"

"Why, I'm a dragon!" he puffed. He seemed a little put out that I didn't know, but not exactly surprised. "Haven't you ever met a dragon before?"

"Not one as…compact as you." I admitted.

"Spike is just a _baby_ dragon," Twilight supplied. She glanced between us for a moment. "That's why he'll be staying here while we deal with this situation."

"Aww!" Spike's reaction to this news was instantaneous and more teen-ager appropriate than toddler, but I was certainly no judge of dragon development, not even back home. "But Twilight, I can help!"

"No, Spike! The princess entrusted you to my care, and that means keeping you safe until you're old enough to fend for yourself." Twilight turned her back on the little dragon and headed back over to the other side of the room and a huge pile of supplies. "If you really want to be helpful, you can pitch in and help me pack these bags."

Spike gave a put-upon sigh, but to his credit hurried to lend a hand at the same time. I wandered over and looked on in bemusement as Twilight, with a mixture of sticky hooves, minor force projections—apparently emanating from her horn, since it glowed a gentle purple-white each time they occurred—and occasional, well-placed use of her mouth, sorted and packed most of the pile into two pairs of saddlebags. The smaller ones were marked with the same star design that graced her hips, but the larger pair was undecorated.

I only tried to pitch in once, when a sack of apples tipped over, spilling across the floor in my general direction, but I'd only managed to round up two with clumsy soccer-kicks of my forelegs when Twilight noticed and brushed them all up into the bag with one smooth sweep of magic.

"Okay, I've got to work out how to do that," I muttered to myself, backing off a bit from the flurry of activity.

Spike looked up at my comment, cocking his head to the side. "But you're a unicorn pony. How do you not know how to do basic telekinesis?"

I grunted uncomfortably. "It's not a matter of not knowing," I said. "It's just a matter of proper translation." I tilted my head, matching his angle more or less. "And I think I might see the problem. Twilight, does all of your magic channel through your horn?"

She paused in her packing flurry, and looked at me. "Of course. Oh! Yes, that is the difference, S-Harry. Why don't you give it some practice, while we finish here?" and a glimmer of lavender magic rolled one of the fallen apples over to me.

I settled down on my butt again, almost starting to feel comfortable in the odd position, and concentrated on the apple, and the jutting section of bone sticking out of my forehead. The problem was, I still couldn't really tell that it was there. Finally, I lifted a foreleg and dragged it across my face until it ran into the stupid thing, pressing against the horn and pulling my whole skull a little sideways with it. I stuck my hoof to the smooth spiral and tugged it back and forth a little, trying to get a feel for the thing from the inside. The base of my horn was planted right above and between my eyes, right where I would normally imagine—"Of course." Right where my Third Eye should be.

[[For an illustration check LogicMouse's  
>deviantart scrapbook page, "Harry Flanks - 2"]]<p>

I slowed my breathing and focused on that place just as though preparing to open my Sight. And the more I concentrated, the more I realized that I _could_ feel the presence of the tall spiral of bone. Not through any mundane nerves, but through my supernatural senses. In fact, now that I'd found it at all, it flared and shivered in my perceptions like a lightning rod on a stormy night; drawing in energy—magic—from the world around me. But instead of the earth, it was grounded in my bones. "Ah," I murmured. "_There_ you are."

I opened my eyes again, planted my forefeet, and focused on the apple in front of me, drawing in magic and focusing it into my gentlest version of a force spell. Twilight didn't speak any words to use her magic, but I normally do, so I went with what I knew, concentrating on lifting the apple up into the air before me, jerking my chin up and willing the spell out from my horn with a gently murmured, "_Forzare."_

The apple shot straight into the air, as fast as if I'd fired it from a potato cannon or something, and splattered messily against the ceiling. "Oops." I stared up at it in confusion until a juicy chunk separated itself from the mass and fell right between my eyes. I blinked and frowned, shaking it off without thinking, and spreading the mess all over. "What did I do wrong?" My problem has always been more power than control, but I've moved glass bottles with that little spell without breaking them. How could I have miscalculated so badly? I glowered at Twilight, who was frowning back at me, more disconcerted than annoyed.

"I-um. I'm not sure. But we don't generally use a verbal incantation except for very difficult spells." She lowered her head, and tapped one hoof against the floor, thinking. "When I performed the rite to bring us back here from your world, it was much more difficult than I was expecting. As though the magic was thinner there. Or farther away. Probably, you just don't need to try so hard."

"Hm. Makes sense." I glanced up at the applesauce art on the ceiling. "Sorry about the mess."

She chuckled. It was a pleasant little sound. "Don't worry about it. Cleaning up will give Spike something to keep him busy after we leave."

"Grr. I always get the mucky jobs," he complained, digging at a full saddle bag with one pointy big toe. But he didn't really look terribly upset, as best I could tell from his odd, purple face. Then he narrowed his eyes at me. "But how about you do the rest of your practicing with something cleaner, huh, Harry?"

"Good idea," I agreed, suddenly seeing in the tiny purple dragon a closer resemblance to my apprentice's formidable mother, Charity Carpenter than to a harmless little dewdrop fairy.

I glanced around for a moment, but before I could find something less breakable, Spike produced three balls of brightly colored yarn for me, for which I thanked him.

Twilight was right. I hadn't been able to tell at first because of the different interface created by the horn, but the magic really was far more accessible here. Lifting the balls of yarn into the air, even two or three at a time, was dead simple, requiring even less energy than lighting up my pentacle amulet, which was the single easiest act of magic I knew back home. Actually, it was almost more like the tiny act of focused will required to close a magical circle. And that was something even a throughly unskilled mortal could do with just a little instruction.

By the time Twilight was done with the packing, I was juggling all three balls of yarn, half-a-dozen books that had been on the floor nearby, a stray teacup, and Spike. He thought it was pretty fun until I accidentally thumped one of the books into his backside, flipping him upside down in the process. "Ow! Hey!"

"Sorry." I lowered him carefully back to the ground, spinning him upright once again, as Twilight turned around. Once he was safely down, I let everything else settle, piling the books back on the floor, then the cup on top of them, then the balls of yarn one, two, three, with the bottommost balanced in the cup. For a little more practice at subtlety, I kept just enough of a hold on the second and third balls of yarn to keep them stacked. "Hah. Not bad, for a newbie!" I crowed, and looked up at my guide.

She wiped the dumbfounded look off her face as soon as she saw me looking at her, and coughed once. "Yes. Not bad at all." Her voice sounded a little flat, all of a sudden.

"Not bad?" crowed Spike. "That's almost as many as you can do, Twilight! And you've never picked me up at the same time as a bunch of other stuff!"

Ahem. I glanced between the delighted look on the little dragon's face and the miffed one on the purple pony's and suddenly realized that I might have unwittingly stepped on some toes here. I let go the last of my magic and the two unsupported yarn balls thumped to the floor. "Ah, well. You know." I blinked, and felt my eyebrows scrunching together in befuddlement. What could I say? "Beginner's luck?"

There was a dead silence in the room for a moment, broken only by the crackling of the fire, and what I would have sworn was a single cricket chirping. Then Twilight's nettled mask cracked and she ducked her head, giving me a rueful grin. "I'm sorry. I guess I'm just a little too used to being the best at magic around here. Celestia wouldn't have sent me to you if you weren't–"

She hesitated for a breath, and I stepped in to offer a little balm for her wounded pride. "More experienced," I finished for her. "The term you're looking for is more experienced, Twilight. When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?" I finished, in my best muppety, apprentice-teasing voice.

Her jaw dropped again. "You're nine hundred years old?"

I almost choked on a laugh. "No. Not quite. But I'm still a lot older than you." I glanced at the neat, bulging bags next to her and changed the subject before my stupid sense of humor could accidentally make the young lady any _more_ uncomfortable. "Are we ready to go, then?"

"Oh. Yes! All ready." Her horn glowed briefly, and she lifted the smaller set of saddlebags onto her back. I followed suit with the others, twisting my neck around to watch what I was doing. That, at least, was made easier by the wider-set eyes in my pony face.

Twilight turned to head downstairs, and I followed. Something about the stairs struck me wrong, though, and I paused, lifting a hoof to hold her back.

"What?"

"Did you turn off the lights down there when we came upstairs?"

"N-No. I didn't."

"Well, they're off now."

"What does–"

"Shh," I cut her off, then half-lidded my eyes and Listened. I heard nothing. But it was a particular flavor of nothing. I felt the skin crawling on the back of my neck, much the same way as I have many times before—although given, all those other times it didn't have quite so much neck to play with—and increased the intensity of my focus on the lack of sound downstairs. It was a very purposeful silence. The distinct, breath held, feet stilled silence of a number of people trying very hard to be quiet.

"Oh, this can't be good," I growled, shouldering past Twilight, and heading down the stairs.

I don't know whether it was the sudden tension making me rush, the saddlebags unbalancing me, or just the fact that going _down_ the stairs was more challenging than coming up them had been, but I found myself gaining momentum much faster than I wanted to. In particular, my hindquarters kept on trying to overtake my forequarters, leaving my balance shaky at best.

With all the lights off on the main floor of the library, the corner where the stairs descended was quite dark. Dark enough that I had no warning before my leading foot came down on something pliable, warm, and apparently alive on a step about halfway up from the floor. My first thought—born of many years living with a landlord of the feline persuasion—was; _Cat!_ And of course, my reaction was just as knee-jerk. I jerked my knee up, pulling my weight off before I could do any damage to the small creature, whatever it was. Unfortunately, despite my current plethora of legs, this action somehow left me with not a single one solidly supporting my weight.

Gravity, harsh mistress that she is, took over, and my headstrong backside preceded me down the last few steps. I hit the floor ass first, bounced, got a random sample of feet under myself, and staggered two steps forward, only to feel my chest collide with a large piece of furniture that I didn't recall being in the way. Inertia kept my neck going in the same direction and planted my face in something soft and gooey, that smelled overwhelmingly of sugar and chocolate.

I dragged myself out of the suffocating confection just as all of the lights in the room flicked back on and two-dozen high, cheerful voices shouted, "Surprise!"

Digging clumps of cake and frosting out of my eyes, I squinted around myself at a room transformed. The library we had passed through just minutes ago had been cozy, messy, crowded with books in heaps on the floor, but otherwise very lightly decorated and entirely unoccupied. Now, somehow, all the books were tucked away on their shelves and several tables had been brought into the room and piled high with food, drink, dish-ware and party favors. A herd of balloons floated around the ceiling, their colorful ribbon tails forming a rainbow veil in the air. Confetti drifted down where the surprisers had presumably tossed it just now, and a grand banner hung across the top of the largest bookshelf, proclaiming in precise but obviously hand-painted foot-high letters; "Welcome, Hero!"

The rest of the floor space was full of a riot of pastel ponies, all grinning and cheering at me, despite—or perhaps because of—my presumably resplendent buttercream mask.

I looked around behind myself, out of sheer curiosity, to see Twilight and Spike making their careful way down the steps and around the obstruction that had been my downfall. As it turned out, there was a very small alligator sitting in the middle of the step.

It had extremely large purple eyes.

It blinked them at me.

One at at time.

Creepy.

I looked away from the creepy little reptile just in time to get a face full of bright pink pony. Her neon pink mane was as curly as a handful of those spiral ribbons they specifically make to drive cats into attacking your neatly wrapped presents, and she looked as though she'd bounce just as well. She thrust her face up to about half an inch away from mine and shouted, "Hi, I'm Pinkie Pie and you must be the hero who's going to help us rescue our friends!" Without actually pausing for breath, she bounced over to my other side so as to assault both ears equally and continued; "I'm so happy to meet you because we really need a hero right now and when Twilight went away to ask Princess Celestia for help I wasn't sure she'd be able to find anypony because we've never needed help before—" then popped up right between my forelegs, staring straight up my nose for some reason, "—and we were the ones who saved all of Equestria from Nightmare Moon and rescued the princess after all and so if we couldn't deal with these things trying to eat people I didn't think that anypony at all—" and then just as suddenly she was upside down above me, her eyes nearly bumping into mine. "—could do it but here you are with Twilight so I'm betting you're the one who can and that will be a really _really_ REALLY good thing—" And then before I could even look up to see what she was hanging on to up there, she'd disappeared again, reappearing close enough to my elbow to make me jump half out of my skin. "—so that's why I threw you this party!"

By the time the pink pony stopped talking, my brain was doing gentle pirouettes on the inside of my skull, trying to catch up with her. In lieu of that, I licked the frosting off my upper lip. It was creamy, and chocolaty, and very good. "You're a refugee from Acme University, aren't you?" I asked the manic apparition.

"Of course not, loopy goopy! I'm not a refugee, I live right here!"

A lightbulb went on in my head. I glanced up to make sure it wasn't visible. "_Riiiight,_" I told Pinkie Pie, nodding. "Thanks. I'm in a fucking cartoon." So I licked the frosting off the rest of my face. In one long pass. And smacked my lips as I swallowed. It really was very good.

"Well of course not, silly nilly Willy! We don't do that sort of thing around here!"

_Of course not, you've got nothing to do it with._ I shook my head in the dim hope of rattling a little sense back into it. "What are all you ponies doing here?" I asked the room at large. "I thought we were supposed to be keeping things on the down-low."

Twilight sauntered up next to me, glaring at the pink one. "We _were_. How did you find out about this, Pinkie Pie?"

"It's simple silly! I saw the two of you coming into town, and I knew that you were really worried about what happened to Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash and Applejack and all those other ponies who got hurt and you went to Princess Celestia to find someone to help us rescue them and I knew you wouldn't just be hanging out with just anypony while our friends were missing even though he's kind of cute and so I knew he must be here to do the rescuing so he must be a hero and heroes are a big deal; I mean I've never seen one before, unless you count Rainbow Dash when she saved Rarity from falling when her wings melted, but that was different because I see Rainbow Dash every day anyway and so I don't need to make a big deal about her, but this guy is a stranger and I thought what's more important when a strange hero comes walking into town than to throw him a really big party so he'll know how much we appreciate his help!"

"Oh. Yeah." Twilight responded to this Niagara Falls of information while I cranked my jaw back into place. Where did she _get_ all the breath for that? "Thanks, Pinkie Pie. I'm sure he appreciates the show of hospitality, but we really do need to get to work as soon as possible, and the princess specifically asked me to keep things quiet, so maybe we should–"

"Twilight Sparkle, _darling_, aren't you at least going to introduce us properly before trying to rush off?" a warm, velvety purr of a voice cut in. I turned to the source, a lovely white pony with a beautifully styled, deep purple mane who stood fluttering a spectacularly large and impressive collection of eyelashes at me.

Twilight uttered a heartfelt, long-suffering sigh—much like many that have emerged from my own throat when dealing with other people—and muttered grudgingly, "Harry, this is Rarity, and you've already met Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie, Rarity, this is Harry… Flanks, the troubleshooter Princess Celestia found to help us."

I felt my nostrils flare at the pseudonym the unicorn had invented for me and narrowed my eyes at her, but I hadn't bothered to think of a better one myself, and in any case, it was too late now. "Just call me Harry, please," I filled in, offering a hoof to the elegant mare.

"And you can call me _anytime_, darling!" Rarity responded, gracefully placing her dainty digit in mine, as though expecting it to be kissed, rather than shaken. I managed a passably collected bow over the offered limb, then got my own leg back on the floor before I could start wobbling noticeably.

"Well, I know figuring out what's going on is really important, but it's also a big problem, and my mom taught me never to tackle a big problem on an empty stomach, so you should at least stay long enough to have some cake and punch so you can do the best problem solving you can, right, Harry?" Pinkie Pie ran on, thankfully not shifting her position unnaturally this time.

I opened my mouth to turn the offer down, but caught the attentive looks from all the other ponies crowding the room in the corner of my eye. It occurred to me that if the princess really wanted us to keep the whole investigation as quiet as possible, then showing a little nonchalance now might be a very good move. "Sure, Pinkie Pie. I would love to try some of your refreshments. And you're right, an investigator's got to eat."

"But Sir–uh, Harry, the time?" Twilight hissed, with a worried frown.

"Look," I murmured, bending closer to her ear. "If we really want things kept quiet, it might be better if we did our exploring after dark, anyway. Sunset's only an hour or so off, right? I think we can survive that much delay."

She grimaced, and looked away for a moment, muttering, "It's not us I'm worried about," but nodded shortly and turned away toward the tables laden with food.

So I mingled, and ate, and did my best to make a little small talk with the other guests for a while. But every time I glanced toward the door where we had set down our packs, my nerves tightened just a little more. I tried to make some use of the time by digging for a little more background on the incidents, but most of the ponies at the party didn't seem to have been present when the attacks happened, and the ones who knew anything at all shied away from discussing it more strongly than almost any witness I'd ever spoken to back home. All I ended up getting for my trouble was a nagging feeling that there was something more to all this than just some angry critters encroaching on territory that wasn't theirs.

Pretty soon, someone turned on a record player and about half of the guests started dancing, which was pretty funny to watch, and downright terrifying to contemplate participating in, so I maneuvered myself over to a quieter corner, near the door. Rarity followed me.

"So…_Sir_ Harry?" she murmured inquiringly, somehow barricading me away from the rest of the guests with a deft twist of her head. Wow, those were impressive eyelashes.

I cleared my throat. "Uh, yeah, try and keep that under your hat, would you? As far as everybody here is concerned I'm just a special investigator, okay?"

"But you are a knight?"

"Not one of your Princess's you know. I'm from…_way_ out of town."

"Mm. A _foreign_ knight. Tell me more, please."

I sighed and took a sip of the punch hovering next to me. "It wasn't something I wanted. I kind of got backed into a corner." _A little like now, actually,_ I thought. _Only with more pain, terror and earth-shaking sex._ "Mab hasn't been quite as bad a boss as I was expecting, but it's no walk in the park." I prodded my pleasantly fuzzy brain for some way to divert the conversation. What was in this punch, anyway? "Wait, were you there, at any of the attacks?"

"Oh. Well, yes. I went with Twilight and our other friends to investigate after the second time. When the girls disappeared." Her flirtatious demeanor suddenly sagged. "It was quite terrifying, I don't mind telling you. And so _very_ messy." She shuddered delicately, and closed her mouth with a moue. "I would really rather not discuss it."

I sighed. "Yeah, you and everybody else who was there. Or even saw the aftermath. I understand that this is a very peaceful area, but still. The attack must have been incredibly violent to have affected everyone so strongly."

"Oh, it was, Harry. It was." Her eyes took on a distant, distracted look. "Those poor, poor ponies. Pieces everywhere. And the awful mess. I–" She shook her head, shying away from whatever ugly scene was replaying itself behind those big purple eyes. "It was so entirely _wrong_. You simply _must_ keep it from happening again!"

I watched her shiver, feeling even more awkward in my borrowed body. Were we humans, I might have put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but…Oh, what the hell. I raised a foreleg and stroked her back gently. She tucked herself into the curve of my chest as though such a thing were perfectly natural. I rested my chin on her poll for a moment, gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, and said as reassuringly as I could, "That's what I'm here for, Rarity. I'll do my best for you."

Not long after that, Pinkie Pie tornadoed by, and swept me off into the maelstrom after all. I'm not much of a modern dancer, but I figured a little exertion might help clear my head of the surprisingly strong punch—or maybe it was just a sugar high. The cake had been _very_ good. After the third time I managed to step on someone else's hoof, though, I felt it reasonable to bow out again. Pinkie Pie didn't even notice. She was busy hip checking half the other dancers into the walls and each other. The one time she'd tried that move on me, I was lucky enough to have most of my legs on the ground at the time, and maybe double her mass, so she'd bounced.

I caught sight of Twilight lurking near the front door, and a glance out the open top half showed me a cool, purpling sky. I made my way to her side as casually as I could manage, and asked, "So, any ideas on how to get out of here unnoticed?"

She looked up at me for a moment with a smug little smirk, then across the room. "Yep. I've got it all covered. Now, Spike."

From the other side of the room, near the stairs, came the sudden flash and pop of some small fireworks, followed by Pinkie Pie's excited shout. All the rest of the guests turned that way, and Twilight and I snatched up our bags and slipped out the door under cover of more distractingly bright sparkles and whistles. I shut the door behind us and we hurried around the side of the tree and out into the open space beyond it, a rolling meadow scattered with normal sized trees and a few picnic tables—sans benches, reasonably enough.

We trotted in silence until the sound of music and crackle of Spike's ongoing distraction faded into the background of the quiet night, and then both of us heaved a toes-deep sigh of relief at pretty much the same time. I chuckled. "I take it you're not much of a party animal either."

"No. I'm more of a bookworm. Although I've come to appreciate parties a lot more since I got to know Pinkie Pie."

"_Whoopie!_" The aforementioned shrieked happily, bouncing out from under a nearby table, where she couldn't possibly have been hiding. "I knew you didn't really hate parties as much as you said, Twilight! Nobody could hate a party that much."

While I was still trying to settle back into my skin after that shock, I heard hooves thumping through the grass behind us, and turned to see Rarity, complete with a neat pair of saddlebags of her own and a broad-brimmed lady's hat in a forest camo pattern, hurrying up from behind us. My head drooped till my nose was practically buried in the dirt.

"My goodness, darlings," Rarity said, looking back and forth between me and Twilight, whose ears were pinned back to her skull in irritation. "Surely you didn't think we'd let you run off to rescue our friends without our help?"

I shook my head. "What happened to the horrible, horrible messiness?"

"Well, messy is one thing, darling, but it's not enough to keep me from helping my friends when they need me!"

And somehow I just couldn't argue with that.


	4. Chapter 4

**New Evidence**

Once the four of us had made it most of the way across the park and into heavier woods, Twilight brought forth a gentle glow of light from the tip of her horn, to supplement the stars and the low-hanging full moon. I resisted the instant impulse to try that trick out for myself. Given my current run of luck, I'd most likely overdo it and leave all the roosters in the area thinking it was sunrise.

"How far off is the site of the last attack?" I asked, keeping my voice low.

"Not too far," Twilight said. "It's just north of the river, in fact. Maybe an hour's walk."

"It happened that nearby?"

"Yes," she answered. "The other two attacks were on the outskirts of two other towns that border the Everfree Forest. The first was near Pinto Vista. It's farther away, and south of here. The second was to the north, at a town called Hackamore, on the outskirts of Manehattan. It's just over a day's walk away. The six of us were on the way back from investigating that attack, along with the only two ponies from Hackamore who had seen what happened, when they came out of the forest after us. I–" She hesitated for a moment. "I'll go over it in more detail when we get there, Sir Harry. I'd rather not dwell on it any more than I have to."

I stifled another sigh. _You and every other pony, I guess._ "Sure, Twilight, that's okay."

It was, as promised, not a long walk. We made it in near silence, aside from Pinkie Pie's occasional irrepressible pronking around and around in circles—what was she, half-antelope?—but even she grew a bit more subdued when we finally got to the scene.

The trees opened up along the southern bank of a river—probably another loop of the one that wound around the town further south—and across a delicately arched little wooden bridge, we came to a scene straight out of cartoon nightmare.

The three fillies stopped dead at the top of the rise, just after we'd crossed the river, and I paused with them, glanced around at the tree-dappled dimness, and then tried out that horn-based light trick. As I'd half expected, it was little different from applying a touch of will to make my pentacle amulet glow, just easier. The light rose from a moon-like luminosity to the strength of a city streetlight before I called it good, much brighter than I ever bothered with back home.

The scene laid out before us was made no prettier by the sharp illumination. Dark swaths and splatters of dried blood covered much of the slope before us, leading from the edge of a thicker stand of trees maybe two hundred feet away almost to the base of our little hill. The dark, indistinct shapes of what were probably several raccoons shifted and scuttled away from my light, retreating into the shadow of the heavier woods. In the torn up grass where they had been, the mangled remains of two cartoon ponies lay near the ends of the blood trails, and smaller trails led to a few scattered bits that had been torn off and gnawed. The largest of the raccoons hung back, staring at us from the base of a big tree, his paws and masked face stained with dark pony blood.

"Eugh! What are those creatures doing?" Rarity moaned from behind me, sounding sickened.

"Oh my goodness," Twilight murmured softly, "I've never seen anything like it."

I glanced back at the girls, a little puzzled. "They're scavengers. It's not pretty, but dead is dead, and to them food is food."

Three pairs of brilliant, oversized eyes locked onto me at that, each showing a different degree of horror. "Eew!" Pinkie Pie seemed to be speaking for all of them. "That's the most awful-est thing I've ever heard! You don't _eat_ dead people!" I'd swear they all shuffled just a little farther away from me.

"Of course, _I_ don't!" I protested, "I'd never–Oh good grief. It's just–," Six huge, childlike eyes continued to stare unnervingly at me, and I gave it up as a lost cause. "Never mind. The raccoons aren't important. Now that we're here, can you tell me what happened?" I pled. "In as much detail as possible, please."

The ponies exchanged several meaningful looks before Twilight sidled slightly forward, returning to her role as self-appointed spokes-pony. "We were coming back along the trail, just on the other side of that grove of trees," she gestured with her horn toward the thicket where the blood trails seemed to originate. "When we heard something that sounded like a foal crying out, off in the woods. Fluttershy was behind the rest of us, closest to it, and she ran off to help. Dash, Applejack and Rarity went after her, but Pinkie and I were farther away, at the front of the group with Glitter Belle and Turnip Seed. We'd hardly turned around when these creatures jumped out of the brush all around us. There must have been five or six of them." She hesitated, her whole body beginning to shiver with remembered emotion.

I lowered my voice, making it as calm and soothing as I could manage. "I need you to describe them, Twilight. Every detail you can remember."

She nodded, skittish but determined, and went on. "They were bigger than us. At least as tall as you, Sir Harry, but longer. They looked a little like cats. Broad heads, stripy coats, and long heavy tails, but they had wings too. Big leathery wings like a dragon's. They looked a little like manticores, actually. They weren't as big as that though, and they didn't have stinger tails." She closed her eyes for a moment and shuddered. "But the main thing I remember about them was the teeth. They were huge, and sharp. And the one right in front of me lunged at me with its mouth open. As though it was going to bite my face. So I saw them really clearly. I was so surprised I hardly realized I'd levitated it until I had already thrown it into a tree. But the one right next to it–" She swallowed, and her gaze slid down the hill to the closer of the two corpses. "Turnip Seed was next to me. That one went for him. He tried to jump out of the way, but its mouth closed on his hip. He screamed. So loud. And then he just… opened up. His flank was open. You could see inside it like a figure from Browntail's Comparative Anatomy—but of course Browntail didn't study ponies, that would be…" She stopped, gulped air, and shook herself, just before I would have said something. "And then you couldn't see any more, there was just this red pool—a river, and it got all over everything. It went everywhere. Those teeth were all covered in red, when it opened its mouth again. I–He started running this way, trying to get away from it, and Glitter Belle went after him."

"Me too," Pinkie Pie interjected, nothing like her usual exuberant self. "I couldn't think what else to do, so I skedaddled."

Twilight blinked at her, eyes focusing on the present again. "Maybe so, but you kicked one of them right in the nose on the way."

"Oh. Well, yeah. I did." Pinkie shook out her mane, as though chasing off flies, and said, "But it wasn't enough. They came after us, and they got Glitter, and Turnip. One almost got me, too, but Twilight grabbed it first."

Twilight's head drooped a little. "Yes. I managed to throw another one before it could hurt Pinkie, but I wasn't fast enough to stop the rest of them. They sort of kept their distance after that, but all of them were circling around, taking turns swatting and biting at us, like it was some sort of game. And then there was another scream from back in the woods. Almost like words, but not quite. And all of the ones attacking us just hopped up and flew off, back toward the Everfree Forest."

"So these two, Glitter and Turnip, were dead, by then?" I asked gently.

Twilight nodded, eyes drawn once more to the pathetically mangled bodies. "There were huge pieces just–just torn out of them." She swallowed, her face literally turning from its usual violet to a sickly pale green. "There was nothing we could do, so we went back looking for Fluttershy and the others."

"Okay." I nodded, settling the pieces of her story in my mind, fighting down the disgusted rage that swelled within me at the thought of anyone–any_thing_ perpetrating such havoc on these innocent little girls. Ponies. Whatever. What they needed from me right now was calm. Clear thought and sensible investigation. First I needed to gather as much information as I could about these flying cat things. Then I had to track them down to their lairs.

_Then_ I could burn them all to ashes and charcoal.

With a little effort I unlocked my jaw and took a couple of deep, calming breaths. "All right. I'm going to have a closer look around this area, then we'll head into the woods and Rarity can tell us what she saw." The three of them stood in a small, nervous cluster at the top of the little hill while I made my way down into the meadow, stalking cautiously around the ugly remains, stopping to make closer examinations of the wounds on both bodies, to get a more objective picture of the attack.

There were bite marks on both of them. The larger, minty green one with deep purple mane and tail had one flank torn open, the bones of the pelvis and thigh exposed, grayish-red entrails (with darker reddish-grey outlines) spilling out, partly gnawed by the smaller latecomers. His shoulders and rump were scored in several places by the deep, parallel grooves of claw marks. Four at a time, spread almost twice as wide as the end of my hoof. _Big_ cat. Not good. I kept looking.

The smaller, pale blue one's throat had been ripped out, her flowing pink mane clumped and clotted with blood. Her wildly open eyes stared blankly up at me as I tried to take in every detail without thinking too much. It only sort of worked. I turned away, checking out the ground around them, looking for tracks.

[[For an illustration, see LogicMouse's  
>Deviantart scrapbook page, "The victims"]]<p>

There were lots. Trails of variously sized hooves muddled and crossed with bunches of big, pad-pawed cat tracks. I'm no Lone Ranger; I could tell that the tracks were there, but I couldn't have told you more than the obvious. The attackers had been there; they walked around a bunch. In a couple of places I saw where one of the cats had stood for a moment, leaving a deeper than normal imprint, then its trail simply ended. Must be where they'd taken off at the end of the attack.

It took maybe half an hour before I could convince myself that I wasn't going to see anything more here. I looked back to the three little ponies huddled together at the top of the hill and gestured them to come join me at the edge of the trees.

As we proceeded down the track, I nudged Rarity as gently as I could, "So, you and your other three friends went off after the crying foal. What happened next?"

She looked up at me for a long moment in silence, her ocean blue eyes wide with apprehension. I tried to soften my expression as much as I could, to minimize the pressure, but I don't think I did too well. She blinked and looked away, sighing, and when she finally began to speak her gaze was distant, peering into the heart of the woods as though seeing the scene all over again.

"There wasn't much of a trail, but Fluttershy has an instinct for these sorts of things. She ran as though she were in her own back garden."

"Uh, an instinct for what, exactly?" I interrupted.

"Small creatures in need," she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "She's the very spirit of kindness. She tends to half the little birds and animals around Ponyville by herself, and helps others with their duties when she has a moment to spare. I'd say she could sense a rabbit off his feed at fifty paces, but she'd be the one bringing him his lunch. So when she heard a little one in pain, no-one even considered getting in her way."

I nodded, silently urging her on past my ignorance.

"Rainbow Dash was after her like a shot, of course. Not because they're so very close, but because dear Dash will do absolutely _anything_ for a little excitement. She couldn't fly very well in all this brush, but she tried. Applejack was right behind her, shouting for her to slow down and be careful, as always. She's a terribly untidy pony, but very sensible about other things, for all that. I couldn't even tell you what impelled me to follow them, but I did." She tossed her mane uncomfortably, glancing around again. "The branches and brush were simply awful on my mane, and I fell behind the other girls. But I was close enough to see past the trees when Fluttershy found the source of the sounds. It wasn't a foal, for all the sound of it. It was a fox kit. It was–oh."

She came to a dead stop on the path, trembling at the memory for a long moment, and swallowing down obvious nausea before she could continue. "The poor thing was torn open, just like–" She flicked her horn back toward the bodies of their ill-fated traveling companions. "But she was still alive, and crying out in such pain. I've never heard anything so horrible. And one of those creatures, those winged cat things, like Twilight described, was standing over her, grinning and batting at her whenever her cries grew weaker." She shuddered all over and then started moving again, her voice taking on a hard edge of outrage. "The creature was torturing that poor thing on purpose! Deliberately hurting her to draw us in."

She paused again on the path, head swinging around with more focus, less lost in terrible memory. "Here. Right through here is where we ran off the trail."

I nodded, and willed a little more oomph into my light, to help drive back the shadows, real and remembered. "Lead on, Rarity. We're right behind you."

She nodded and turned off into the woods, following a straight but narrow swath of trampled brush and small, broken branches. I plunged in after her, scraping my sides and neck on the brush every few feet no matter how careful I tried to be. Maybe ten or twenty yards in I just gave up and put up with the discomfort.

"I must admit that what happened next is very jumbled in my memory," Rarity continued, speaking over her shoulder to me without slowing her pace. "I would have sworn there was only one creature in the clearing, but as soon as Fluttershy came close, two more dropped down behind her from out of nowhere. I couldn't see her for a moment, but I heard a thump, and then she screamed—the loudest sound she's ever made, I think. And then one of the creatures pounced down and grabbed her in its mouth. It shook her once, like Winona worrying a doll, and then it just took off with her.

"Well, of _course_ Dash threw herself after it on the instant, and of _course_ Applejack bit her tail and tried to stop her. And so when the other creature grabbed Rainbow Dash and took off after the first, she was simply swept right along. The last I saw of them, Applejack had grabbed onto one of that cat's legs and bitten down herself. The creature that had been waiting for us called out something horrid; like a cat's yowl, but almost words, and then all three of them were flying away.

"I'm ashamed to admit it, but I simply stood there, frozen in place until the others came looking for me. Right here." She stopped on the lump formed by the grown-together roots of two old trees, staring down at a small break in the brush. A soft sob escaped her, and she let her head fall almost between her knees.

Pinkie Pie and Twilight pushed past me on either side, rushing to comfort their friend. I stayed out of it, feeling awkward and helpless.

"I failed them entirely," she sobbed into Pinkie's curly mane. "I don't know what came over me. I've been braver than this before."

"You have, Rarity," Twilight said quietly. "Why I've seen you kick a howling manticore right in the nose! And the way you handled that river serpent the day after we met was absolutely fearless!"

"But this was nothing like those times," Rarity murmured. "The wounds, the pain. The sheer _cruelty_ of those creatures. It was all so...terrible. So unreal."

"It's all right, Rarity," Twilight said softly. "This sort of thing is outside of all of our experience. That's why we have help." And she looked back at me, her eyes full of terror and trust.

"That's right. This is what I'm here for," I said firmly. "Speaking of which, I should get to work. You fillies wait here, please." I stepped carefully past them and down into the little glen where this latest abomination had taken place.

Maybe it was the more enclosed environs, maybe it was just in my mind, but the scent of blood seemed to linger here much more strongly than it had where the two ponies had died. The mangled corpse of a ridiculously cute little fox lay where it had been left, in the middle of a broad patch of blood-soaked ground. Deep paw prints surrounded it, and dug carelessly into the soft earth all over the rest of the clearing. I traced out the three sets of pony tracks that came through here, but they only served to verify Rarity's account. They had arrived, been ambushed, and made off with very quickly, with little time for a struggle.

This was no good. I had been counting on finding some sign of the perpetrators' passage; a little spilled blood, some hair or a broken tooth, but none of the attackers had taken enough damage to leave behind any such traces. I didn't see anything here that I could use to track the damned things.

I stared around at the useless crime scene, toying with the idea of opening my wizard's Sight, and scratching idly at one of the deeper scrapes on the side of my neck. Some of those trees were pretty rough for mere illustrations.

I frowned as a thought whacked me between the eyes. I spun around, hurrying back to the three ponies waiting at the edge of the dell, and interrupted their quiet conversation. "What do your missing friends look like?"

"Rainbow's blue with a rainbow colored mane and tail!" Pinkie exclaimed, before the other two finished opening their mouths. "Applejack's kind of orangey with a blonde mane and tail that she always ties up in pony tails, and she always wears a cowboy hat. And Fluttershy's real pale yellow with a long pink mane and tail that drag on the ground most of the time. I don't know how she keeps it clean, but she always does, and it never seems to get in her way or anything. She's just so naturally elegant!" She tilted her head sideways, staring at me with her unnerving, unblinking eyes. "Does that help?"

"Yes, Pinkie Pie. I think that may help a great deal." I nodded, brushing past them and back down the trampled little trail, pushing my light still brighter and stopping to examine every twig and branch that overhung it.

I was most of the way back to the main path and starting to lose hope again when I finally found what I was looking for: snagged in a thorny branch was a single curling pink strand—no more than a lone brush stroke—drooping almost to the ground, and drifting with every breath of a breeze. Gently, I picked it up with a whisker-fine thread of magic and turned to the girls behind me, with a triumphant laugh. "This is Fluttershy's isn't it?"

"Oh." Twilight was closest, and peered carefully at my prize before answering. "Yes, that certainly looks like some of her tail. But how does that help?"

I grinned. "You'll see. This is all I need." I turned back around and hurried the rest of the way back to the trail, heart and feet lighter than they'd felt in a while.

I found an area of reasonably bare ground on the path and had spun to sketch out a circle around myself with a fore-hoof before I'd even thought about it. As pervasive as magic seemed to be around here, it might well be superfluous, but I've always used a circle when casting my tracking spell. Maybe it means I really am a creature of habit, but I took a distinct pleasure in the familiar sensation as the magical barrier snapped into place around me. I settled down on my butt in the middle of the circle, and nearly crossed my eyes permanently while trying to manipulate the pink hair into a knot around the end of my horn. I got it eventually, and half-closed my eyes, summoning my will and the magic trapped within the circle with me to rev up the familiar spell.

It caught hold as easily as I could have hoped, and I felt the spell tighten through the loop of hair against my horn. I let out a small, unobtrusive sigh, and broke the circle with a brief gesture. Immediately, the gentle tug turned into a forceful drag, pulling my head around toward the west as though a giant had just grabbed hold of my horn. "Yikes!" I mumbled, and then I was racing through the woods, breaking a new trail through the underbrush, trying to go fast enough to keep up with my horn and not break my own neck. "Dammit, this place is just _weird!_"

Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about losing the girls. They were right on my tail the whole way. Not literally, but close.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any control at all over where I was going. Or how fast.

Fortunately, I didn't crack my head open on any particularly big low-hanging branches as I raced through the thicket after my misbehaving appendage, despite losing my footing a few times in the rush. The pull of the spell was so strong that when a dip in the ground caught me by surprise I found myself simply dragged along behind my horn, hooves bouncing uselessly through the dirt until I could find my footing again.

Unfortunately, my good luck came to an end just after we broke out of the heavier woods. A small open slope led straight down toward another arm of the river we'd crossed several times, and this time there were no picturesque bridges in sight.


	5. Chapter 5

**New Dangers**

I scrambled desperately for a toe-hold; trying to plant my feet under me, to keep myself from being thrown helplessly into the rushing river ahead and probably drowned. It didn't look good. The distance was vanishing much too fast and I just couldn't seem to catch my balance.

Then I felt a sudden tug on the end of my spine. I managed to twist my head a tiny bit to the side, pivoting around the axis of the spell, and saw Pinkie Pie, her mouth clamped down on the base of my tail, hooves dug in, and pulling back for all she was worth. As I watched, the other two scrambled up and latched on as well, helping to fight the inexorable drag.

Even a dozen more little hooves digging into the turf wasn't enough to stop my headlong rush, but it was enough to slow me down. The extra resistance they added gave me a little breathing room, and a chance to collect myself—in more ways than one.

I've known that I was a wizard since before I could drive. So that's how I tend to think of myself, no matter what other labels might apply. I mean, I spent a few months dead not so long ago, and I still thought of myself as a wizard—okay, a _late_ wizard—more than as a ghost. So it shouldn't be too surprising that I'm still not really in the habit of thinking of myself as the Winter Knight, even though I am.

The Winter Knight has more resources than just 'cool' magic.

In that moment of extra space the ponies bought me, I managed to remember that. As I found my footing one more time—splaying my legs out ahead of me and digging in my heels as much as possible—I reached down inside myself, into that churning maelstrom of icy power entrusted to me by the Queen of Air and Darkness herself, and called up strength enough to fight the pull of the out-of-control spell. My hooves dug deep into the rich, loamy ground as I braced myself and brought an abrupt halt to the headlong scramble.

In fact, I stopped so suddenly that my helpers crashed straight into my rump. I wobbled a little, but managed to keep my balance against the continuing pull, and grunted, "Thanks, girls. I needed that," while they sorted themselves out.

"Twilight, would you be a dear and draw a circle around me?" I asked through gritted teeth.

"Oh. Yes, sure Harry." She hurried to comply, fortunately keeping it in relatively close. As soon as she was done, I carefully loosed one fore-hoof from its death-grip on the ground, reached out and closed the circle with a whisper of will.

The agonizing drag of the spell on my forehead ceased as suddenly as a door slammed on heavy winds, and I plopped straight down onto my butt in reaction to the change. I just sat there for a minute, catching my breath and fighting off the shaky terror that followed my utter loss of control.

"I'm a wizard, dammit," I growled to myself. "I use the magic, it doesn't use _me!_"

"What happened?" Rarity's voice floated out of the darkness behind me, shaking slightly but still utterly proper for all that. "Why did you just stop? Why, when my gem finding spell first went off like that it dragged me for _hours_!"

I glanced back at her, clearing my throat to make sure my voice would work normally before I tried to answer. "It's the circle. Cuts the tracking spell off from its destination." I shook my head a little, feeling much too weary. "Now be quiet, please. I need to fix the stupid thing."

They all nodded, blinking at me with varying levels of comprehension.

I'd never tried to adjust a spell after I got it up and running before. Normally if something went wrong I'd just break it and start again. But I only had the one hair, and terminating the spell might very well damage it beyond usability. All I really needed to do was bleed out the excess power. Easier said than done, as it turns out, as normally such an attempt would simply unravel the delicate balances of the magic entirely. But I'm actually better at thaumaturgy than at the noisier evocations that people know me for. I managed it with a bit of arcane prestidigitation. Once I had energy flowing out of the spell, I just let it bleed through my bones and out into the ground beneath me, where it shouldn't do anyone any harm. I kept pulling away and draining off the energy until I could barely feel the spell's aura tugging gently against my horn.

I was tempted to keep going for a while longer, given just how badly I'd miscalculated the first time, but losing the spell entirely would be an even bigger problem. I called it good, took one long deep breath for luck, and broke the circle again, reaffirming the essence of the spell as I did.

My head swung up and around, the tip of my horn pointing once more straight across the river and into the deeper, darker woods beyond, but the force was no more than that. I could even turn my head away with a little effort. I sighed. "Good. That's got it." I stood and gathered in the three waiting ponies with a nod. "All right, let's go find a bridge, shall we?"

We had to backtrack a good bit to find a bridge over the rushing water of the river, but that gave me an opportunity to make a rough triangulation of our target's position. The news wasn't great, but it could have been worse. I figured it would take us till several hours past dawn to get to where the tracking spell was leading me.

I passed that on as we made our way across the bridge Twilight had led us to, and they took it in stride. I think they might even have been impressed with the information.

Pinkie Pie, rather sensibly, suggested that if we were going that far we might as well stop here for a bite of food before entering the Everfree Forest, which I'd gathered none of the girls were particularly excited about. I went along with it, although I didn't feel hungry.

Pinkie unpacked sandwiches that she said were watercress and daisy—which tasted noticeably less vile than that description led me to expect, mostly thanks to plenty of good mustard—along with canteens of water and slices of leftover cake from the party. I couldn't imagine how she'd had time to pack these things up, given how we left, but it was definitely the same cake; the slice I got had a wedge of my faceprint in the frosting.

I shoved my confusion aside and ate the food, trying to be grateful. At least it wasn't hay.

With relatively little chivvying from me, we were packed up and ready to get going in just a few minutes, and I pulled up some light from my horn again, turned my face toward the tracking spell's tug, and led the way into the woods.

The moment we crossed the boundary into the larger forest, I felt the change. It was as though a subtle pressure had suddenly been lifted away from me. Not a weight, but something more pervasive, like an immersion in water—or an atmosphere heavier than normal anyway. It was a surprise, but almost a relief as well; a low, constant tension that had been pressing in on me unnoticed since the moment I stepped through the portal to this weird world was suddenly gone. I felt myself heaving a long, sighing breath of relief. On impulse, I looked back to see how the transition affected my companions.

They felt it alright, although it clearly didn't strike them as a welcome relief the way it had me. As each little pony crossed the border from their territory into the Everfree, I saw them tense, muscles tightening, pulling in on themselves like a rabbit sensing danger. Pinkie Pie showed it the least, but even her bubbling enthusiasm was quelled rather than enhanced by the change in venue. Huh. Odd. I pondered the difference in our reactions for a few paces, but came up with no immediate explanations, and regretfully set it aside to concentrate on the task, and potential perils, at hand.

The dark of the forest was alive with sounds of night creatures; birds, insects and the rustle of wind through the brush. The chilly, sighing breeze brought mingled scents of rich loam, summer flowers, and hidden creatures to my nose, a distracting melange. I paid as much attention to it as I could while following the magical trail, hoping to catch a warning if anything dangerous happened upon us.

Nothing did for quite some time. We passed through the darkest part of the night, making slow patient progress through the mostly trackless forest, and nothing bothered us. Several times I saw what seemed like the shapes of larger creatures at the vague boundaries of my light, but they always veered off rather than moving to challenge us.

The sun rose behind our backs, and the forest awakened. Birds called, brush rustled, and small critters went about their quiet business all around us. My spell flickered and wavered for a moment when dawn broke over us, but I focused my thoughts and pumped enough power into it to compensate for the sunrise's corrosive effect on magic, and it stabilized soon enough. We kept on, moving a little more surely with the better light.

By late morning, my occasional sideways forays to triangulate our destination told me that we were getting close, so I called another halt in a little bit of clearing to let us all recover some from the trek. Pinkie insisted we take the opportunity to have another snack. I didn't argue. Just because I forget to eat half the time doesn't mean I dislike doing it.

"Once we actually find her," I said quietly, "I want you three to hang back until we know what we're facing. It's likely that some of those cat creatures that took your friends will be around, and I don't want any of you getting hurt." _Or killed, more likely,_ I thought, flashing back to the spectacle of those pitiful pony bodies in the meadow. On top of that concern, the Princess' comment about shielding Twilight (and by extension, presumably, her even more vulnerable friends) from any possible violence still stood clear in my memory.

All three of them started to object, talking over one another in their rush to insist that they could help. That they _should_ help, because after all, these were _their_ friends in danger. "Shh!" I hissed, raising both forelegs in a calming motion, "That's not what I'm saying. I'm not going to stop you from helping, I just need to get a good look at the situation before we get involved in it. Do some reconnaissance. Then we'll make a plan."

"Oh. I suppose that makes sense," Twilight answered for them.

"Thanks." I shook my head and climbed back to my feet, fighting off a wave of guilt at the well-intentioned lie. I didn't mean to let any of them get within spitting distance of a fight if there was any way to avoid it, but they didn't need to know that. "Now let's do this."

We passed through maybe another five hundred feet of thickly grown forest before I started to notice the silence, and then the smell. The birds and critters of the woods had cleared out of the area, or gone quiet, and the breeze blowing in my face brought a distinct scent of musk—the sharp, acrid smell of a predator. I turned my head and held up a hoof to my mouth for silence, hoping the gesture would be familiar enough without a finger to raise, then motioned for my companions to wait there. They shuffled to a halt, looking unhappy.

I turned back toward the tug of my tracking spell, gathered my will and pulled a veil around myself. I'm not exactly world-class when it comes to illusion magic, but my ex-apprentice Molly had the potential to be, and training her as best I could had forced me to make significant improvements in my own less-than-stunning skills. My veils in particular have improved almost to the point of not being embarrassingly bad any more.

I heard one of the ponies gasp in surprise as I vanished from view, but paid no real attention. I was too busy concentrating on creeping through the woods the last distance to the enemy camp.

It took a little longer than I'd expected to get there, and the smell was a _lot_ stronger by the time I arrived. My view opened out at the edge of a large area that was naturally clear of low-growing brush. It wasn't perfectly empty, but dotted about with the trunks of big old trees like you see in all those British Robin Hood movies, and graced with the partially collapsed ruins of an old stone building, shaped in a series of looped-together half-circles ringing a central tower like a great stone rose. Huge, striped and spotted cat creatures—with wings variously feathered or leathery—sprawled all over the place, some draped along the top edge of the crumbling outer walls, some lounging on the sunny ground. One blue-green monster lay in the entryway to the building, flopped up against the base of the wall with his head at the same impossible-looking angle Mister always liked to adopt when curled up against a stack of paperbacks on my bookshelves.

There were more than six of them—more like a dozen that I could see, and most likely some out of sight inside the structure as well. Each one was built along the lines of a tiger, but in colors that more closely resembled the eye-searing rainbow of pony pelts I'd seen in town. Striped green and gold, spotted blue and purple, patchwork grey and neon orange, they looked like they'd taken a page from Molly's book of tonsorial fashion, but that didn't make their teeth or claws any less deadly. Apparently.

Holding tight to the veil, and concentrating on the olfactory aspects of it in particular, I made my way around the edge of the clearing, examining the cat-piles and trying to pinpoint Fluttershy's location more accurately. She was definitely in the building somewhere. I was sure of that much by the time I returned to my starting point, but no more. I certainly hadn't been able to see any sign of a little pink and yellow pegasus. Crap. This just wasn't going to be a one-man operation.

I circled back to where I'd left the others, and dropped the veil while I was still about ten feet from them. Appearing suddenly from thin air right next to someone like Murphy or Thomas risks getting you into a world of hurt no matter how much they like you, and how badly they'd feel afterward. I didn't think any of these three had the same kind of reflexes as most of my friends back home, but avoiding that sort of hazard is just a damned sight safer in general.

They were talking quietly amongst themselves when I returned, and all three jumped a little as the veil fell, but Pinkie followed the twitch up with a whoop, poinging in place two or three times as she exclaimed, "See? See? I told you!" Then to me, "That was really neat, can you do it again?"

I scowled and shushed at her, to little effect, until Rarity reached out on a downswing, grabbed Pinkie's head by muzzle and crest and shoved her bodily into the grass, practically falling on top of her. "_Will_ you be quiet, you impossible creature?" she hissed into the pink pony's ear. "Have you completely forgotten where we _are?_"

Pinkie Pie made a muffled mutter that sounded vaguely like "I'm sorry," and Rarity let her up. In a lower voice, but no less enthusiastic tone, she went on, "But I told you I figured it out! That funny shoulder shudder means somebody's invisible!"

"Yes, Pinkie. That's what it seems like," Twilight said quietly. "But it's not very likely to come up again, is it?"

I frowned further. "Don't you know how to do veils, Twilight?" She gave me a blank look. "Invisibility. Or close to it. Haven't you at least heard of that?"

"No, Sir Harry. I've never run across it in any of my books."

"Hmph. Damn. There goes that idea."

"What idea?" she asked.

"Fluttershy is somewhere inside a tower in the middle of a bunch of those cat creatures. They all seem to be napping at the moment. My first thought was that I could distract them, draw them off into the woods and you could sneak in to rescue her while I kept them busy. But if you can't do a veil, I don't want to risk it. Too much chance you'd be caught if they came back."

"Well, I don't know anything about these veils of yours, but if I could get to her, I'm pretty sure I could teleport the two of us far enough away to be safe."

My jaw fell open. _"Teleport?"_ I demanded. "Good grief. Without any preparation?"

"Not really." She looked very slightly smug at my reaction, but conceded, "I can't go very far, or carry much beyond myself, but I think I could manage Fluttershy."

"Well." I hesitated, still flabbergasted by the very idea. Even contemplating the kind of effort that would be required to teleport a living being any distance at all back home made my head start to throb. I shook it a little, dragging my thoughts back to the problem at hand. "That's well and good, but there are three of them missing, right? I only know for sure that Fluttershy's here, but there's a good chance the other two are with her. Could you move four?"

Twilight's face fell. "No. Not a chance. I'm sorry."

"Never mind, kid. We all have our limits."

"That's okay, Harry! You sneak in and get our friends. _I'll _distract them!" Pinkie Pie declared, just as loudly as before, and without a moment's hesitation bounced off into the woods following the trail I'd broken.

Twilight and I shouted, "Pinkie, no!" in practically one voice, but Rarity was the one who raced after her first. We followed, but none of us could keep pace with the insane pink blur streaking ahead of us toward certain doom. Her cheery giggle drifted back to us in the wind of her passage and she called, "Don't worry, wooly foolies, I'm _great_ at tag!"

I considered trying a spell to slow her down, but I've never been great at calibrating such things, even back home. And with the added difficulties of the strange magic around here, I'd be far more likely to break her legs or kill her than stop her safely. So I just kept on after them at the best pace I could manage without tripping and falling on my fool face.

I swiftly started to fall behind even Twilight, and helpless rage curdled in my belly. For the first time since I'd arrived here, I cursed the awkwardness of my borrowed shape. If I knew better how to run on so many limbs I could certainly have caught up with Pinkie Pie, maybe even without drawing on Mab's treacherous gifts. As it was, I didn't dare try to hurry myself that way. I'd just end up breaking my own neck.

We were closing in on the edge of the cat creatures' campground, and Twilight seemed to be falling a little behind the others. I hit a patch of flatter ground and threw myself into a reckless gallop, finally managing to pull almost within reach of her. Then I stretched out my neck, grabbed hold of her streaming navy tail with my teeth and dug in my heels.

Hey, when in Rome.

The two of us slid to a messy stop no more than a stone's throw from the edge of the clearing, and I held on, glaring at the back of her head until she turned to look at me, expression thunderous. "Shh!" I snapped, as soon as she opened her mouth. "If we can't stop her, we can at least try to make her sacrifice _count_ for something!"

The purple pony's face crumpled into a horrified mask, and she just stared at me for a long moment. Over her shoulder I could vaguely see and hear the majority of the cat creatures thrashing up and leaping to the chase—startled from sleep by Pinkie Pie and Rarity's swift and utterly unexpected passage straight across the edge of their camping grounds. The girls had a good lead on them, but the cats looked terribly fast. There was no time.

"I'll veil us both. Stick close and stay quiet!" I stepped up next to her, crossed my eyes again focusing on my silly horn, and drew together another veil, covering both of us. The sun-dappled glade before us wavered and dimmed, as though seen through a few inches of murky water. "Alright, come on." She shook her head but followed me, looking mournful but once again determined.

"She'll manage. She's crazy. She'll find some way," Twilight murmured to herself as we paced out into the swiftly emptying glade. "She'll look after Rarity too. I know she will."

"Shh," I whispered again, "I can muffle sound if I have to, but it makes it harder, and I'm not very good at this."

"Sorry." And she shut her mouth, tucking herself in closer to my side. We crept on toward the old building at the center of the glade. There lay the only remaining group of cats and the low, insistent tug of my tracking spell.

Unfortunately, while Pinkie Pie's noble if idiotic sacrifice had drawn off most of the creatures in the area, it had also alerted the remaining ones to danger. Three of the big cat things stood in a loose line across the only open side of the building; crouched, wings half spread, ready to leap into literal fight or flight at the drop of a hat. Unless we came up with something brilliant, they weren't likely to lower their guard any time soon.

I wasn't feeling particularly brilliant, just now. I was, however, feeling immensely pissed. Crashes, weirdly feline shouts, and a single voice raised in apparently carefree song echoed out of the woods beyond us, and I knew there was no more time.

As quickly as I could, I guided our steps to the lee of an ancient tree near the building, off to one side of the last cluster of cat creatures. "Okay, here's the plan," I whispered to the trembling Twilight. "It looks like there are only three left on guard. I'm going to take out one or two and get the rest's attention. You hide behind this tree till I draw them off, then get in and get your friends out. I'll join you as soon as I can. Got it?"

She nodded tensely, crouching behind the tree. I gave her an encouraging nod and moved off, taking the veil with me, until I stood almost directly in front of the three great cats.

Then I planted my feet, lowered my horn to point straight at the enemy, drew in my rage and will, dropped the veil and bellowed, _"Fuego!" _

Silly looking or not, the horn worked at least as well as my blasting rod for focusing the attack. A brilliant spear of red and white flame shot forth from its tip and lanced into the cat closest to Twilight's hiding place, slamming into its shoulder and side with a thunderous roar, rolling up one broad half-open wing and leaving behind a gamey whiff of charred meat and the painful, plastic stench of burnt feathers. The cat went down with a terrified yowl, thrashing weakly as the fire chewed into its chest and face, and the other two sprang at me without hesitation.

The solid red one in the middle of the line came charging straight at me, broad mouth opened wide in a horrendous, chest-shaking roar, but the blue and yellow one to the side leapt into the air to come at me from above. I raised my chin toward this aerial threat, then summoned another surge of raw will and with a shout sent a blast of pure force spiraling in from above it to slam the beast straight into the ground. It hit with an earth-rattling boom and the rippling crackle of bones breaking. I snorted in satisfaction. That one might get up eventually, but it wouldn't be flying anywhere for a long while, if ever.

Big Red was closing in fast on my position, wings tucked back to his sides, lips pulled back from teeth big enough to make Clyde jealous. There was no room or time for me to get out of the way, and to be honest I had no desire to do so. Instead, I tucked in my chin and charged him right back.

I'm not exactly an expert at jousting in general, let alone playing the horse's part, but right that moment I didn't particularly care. I kept my head relatively high as I closed in, trying to get a good view. Big Red tucked his head in tighter as he registered my response, apparently planning to protect his chest and legs with those big, gnashy teeth.

At the last moment before we collided, I lowered my head, aiming the tip of my horn at his chest, but at the same time he coiled his back legs under himself and leapt, sailing in a graceful arc up and over my head, his mouth and massive forepaws angling straight for my back.

I twisted my neck around, frantically bringing the tip of my horn to bear again, but the angle was all off, and it only scraped along the side of his ribcage, digging a furrow no more than an inch or so deep. I felt those massive jaws clamp down on both sides of my spine, the thick forepaws wrapping around me in a death grip, and for a moment I froze in terrified expectation of the agony and sudden numbness of a broken back. _Oh please, not again._

But the pressure of his teeth never became anything like pain. I felt the points of them scraping along my hide, along with the massive claws that were perfectly positioned to disembowel me, but it felt no more uncomfortable than someone poking me with the end of a broomstick. A bunch of broomsticks.

In fact, it felt a lot like a serious attack being deflected by my spell-armored duster. The one I wasn't wearing anymore. I guess Celestia hadn't been kidding about my equipment being incorporated into my new form.

My lips pulled back from flat, heavy teeth in a fighting grin, as the cat creature's momentum tumbled us both over onto our backs. That put me on top momentarily, but my mass was much less than this thing's and all of my limbs were in entirely the wrong place to do me any good. Red just kept gnawing away at me, apparently unable to fathom my resistance to his teeth, and squeezing tight with those big heavy paws, which was actually causing me more trouble—snatching my breath as he forced the air out of my lungs.

I twisted and thrashed, legs flailing as I scrabbled for purchase, and then my head and neck slid down along the side of his chest, and left me staring straight at his writhing back legs.

"_Fuego!"_ I howled again, and the blast engulfed the luckless cat creature's nether regions. Heat and flame and the stink of burnt hair and charred meat rolled back into my face, choking me further, and the death grip on my barrel fell apart as Red screamed and convulsed, jerking himself away into a piteously howling ball of pain.

I rolled away and back onto my feet with a lurch, swinging my head around in a hasty search for more enemies. Three cat creatures lay on the ground in various states of devastation, and only my latest opponent was moving at all. I stood panting, legs braced, scanning the area for a moment longer until I caught sight of Twilight, still crouched behind the tree right where I'd left her, eyes wide in terror—and fastened on me.

I froze for a moment, feeling my heart clench in my chest. I'd seen that expression on too many human faces to be able to fool myself that I didn't recognize it. I wouldn't have thought seeing it one more time could hurt so much.

"Come on!" I growled at her, harsher than I had to be. "We're not done yet." And I turned and hurried into the tower.


	6. Chapter 6

**New Developments**

There were steps of a sort leading up into the building proper—more layers of roughly laid stone—and they rang sharply with the impact of my hooves as I made my way inside. A moment later I heard the softer, somehow tentative echo of Twilight following me, but I didn't glance back. I didn't want to know how long it took her to recover her composure.

You'd think in a world overflowing with magic, that a young woman who was herself so gifted would be above such a reaction. But I guess her mentor had hit the nail on the head. A skilled spell-caster Twilight might be, but she was innocent of true violence.

At least, she had been.

I gritted my teeth and told myself to ignore the psychic ache of the purple pony's reaction in favor of avoiding fangy death from more of the giant cat creatures.

The first space I stepped into at the top of the stairs had little left of the roof, but the walls were mostly intact; a series of arcs of dressed stone bulged toward me around three-quarters of the large room like conical bubbles, each arc pierced by at least one doorway. I paused in the center of the space, and tried to consult my tracking spell for a direction to the captured ponies, but it was gone. There was nothing left of it.

Of course. Channeling a boatload of fire straight through the implement that the hair sample had been tied around had reduced it to a few extra flakes of drifting ash out in the clearing. Dammit. And it looked as though the interior of this place could be an absolute maze.

As I stood there peering into each darkened opening in turn, seeking a clue to the most useful path, Twilight walked up. She stopped almost even with me, but several paces to one side, no longer clinging close for protection as she had before. I glanced at her and away quickly, focusing on the likely dangers.

There wasn't much to see in the shadowy spaces of the decrepit building, so I focused on my hearing, bringing my concentration in tight and Listening. My ability to Listen is not precisely magical, more a perk of years of training in fierce focus and concentration. My view of the room, my sense of its lingering dusty smell and the feel of the hard, slightly rounded stones beneath my hooves faded, and the ambient sounds sharpened. I heard Twilight's short, shallow breathing next to me, the faint thump of her heartbeat, and the soft, rustling motion of several other beings somewhere ahead in the dark.

And I heard it with almost painful clarity when a moment later the little unicorn breathed, "How could you do that?"

My concentration fractured. I closed my eyes, but couldn't block out the sound of her innocent dismay. _How _can_ you do it Harry?_ I asked the dark behind my eyelids. _When exactly did slaughter get to be second nature?_ "Sometimes it's just the law of the jungle, kid," I growled. "Kill or be killed."

What a crappy answer. But I didn't have a better one for her, and now was _not_ the time to be worrying about it. As was brought home a split second later when a single scrape of claw on stone alerted me to approaching danger almost too late.

My eyes flew open on another cat creature that had just squeezed itself through the portal straight ahead of me. It stretched up as tall as possible; pale, feathered wings spreading wide, its jaws gaping open, and unleashed its battle cry: "Rahr."

I blinked. Hell's bells, that had to be the _cutest_ snarl I'd ever heard! "Okay, _that_ was anticlimactic," I said. _"Fue–"_

"Harry _no!"_ And Twilight's small form barreled into my side, sending the blast of flame slewing off to splash across a wall, searing away decades worth of cobwebs and setting the trailing creepers that decorated it alight. We crashed to the ground in a tangle, and I struggled to get back on my feet before the latest attacker could get to us, while Twilight clung to my neck like some kind of fuzzy violet barnacle. "No, you can't kill her!" she screamed. "That's _Fluttershy!_"

I froze in place for a split second as her words registered. Then, with a single glance at the huge, carnivorous, pink-and-yellow creature bearing down on us, I took off, charging around one curving wall of the room and through another doorway, pouring on the speed to get us away from its jaws. Twilight clung tight, her back hooves striking the ground every three or four of my steps as she struggled not to tangle herself in my churning limbs. "What do you mean _that's_ Fluttershy?" I screamed at her, heading straight across another hemispherical hall to the next dark doorway. "I thought she was a pony, like you?"

"Yes. Yes. She is. She was. But trust me. I _know_ my friend! I don't know how or why but I guarantee, that was her!"

"Crap," I opined. "Crap, crap, crap." We passed into and out of another room, darkened by a more complete roof. The pale cat creature was still after us—weirdly muted battle-cry and all—but its sheer size made each doorway a more significant obstacle to it, and we were gaining a little ground. "My magic has never been particularly well suited to taking prisoners, kiddo. I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be here. You got any ideas?"

"I–I don't know. I can't remember ever reading anything about a transformation like this." Twilight finally loosed her death-grip on my neck and fell down to run beside me, which was much more comfortable for both of us, I'm sure.

I shook my head, trying to analyze the situation rationally. The half-headlong run actually kind of helped. I've been in the habit of running for exercise for years now, and although I took it up primarily in anticipation of situations rather like this one, I'd quickly discovered that running was a great way to focus the mind, as well. As my brain went further into adrenaline-fueled overdrive trying to work through the cat-pony problem, I paid less and less attention to my overabundance of legs. Once I started ignoring them, they fell into a thoughtless, natural pattern of movement and my stride evened out and lengthened, until the smaller Twilight actually started having some trouble keeping up.

"Okay. If that's your pony friend, then someone or something transformed her," I panted. I slowed my steps a little to keep us together, thinking out loud. "At least it hasn't been very long since it happened. She's probably not entirely gone. If we can somehow hold her down long enough, we might be able to unravel the spell and get her back to normal."

Another "Rahr!" echoed forth from behind us, just as soft, brief, and oddly endearing as the first time, and Twilight slid to a stop on the dusty stone, obviously struck by a thought. I clattered a few more steps toward the brighter doorway ahead before I managed to do the same, and turned to face her.

"No. We _can_ get her back to normal. We just need to remind her what that _is_." The little purple pony looked up and met my eyes for the first time in a while, determination in every line of her cute, cartoonish face. "I've got this. Just stay out of the way."

My eyebrows went up at the ringing certainty in her tone, but I nodded. She turned to retrace her steps, and I trailed behind at a reasonable distance.

Twilight trotted confidently back through the doorway and placed herself square in the middle of the next room back. A shaft of sunlight, diluted by trees, speared in through the mostly crumbled roof, lighting her up like a beacon in the dimness. I stopped just past the door, teeth clenched, wondering whether she really knew what she was doing. Not that I had a lot of time to worry about it. Mere moments later, the huge pink cat creature appeared in the next room back, squeezed through the doorway and hurtled straight toward Twilight's tiny, still form.

"Fluttershy!" Twilight called out in a ringing voice, as soon as she came into view. "This isn't you! I know you, Fluttershy, you won't hurt me, no matter what you've been forced to think! You're too kind for that! You–"

The Flutter-cat reached her, and without the slightest hesitation it swung one paw out in a blurring strike that caught the pony right across the ribcage, sending her flying sideways into the wall. The creature slid to a stop, letting out a pleased little growling sound—like a cat with a catnip mouse—and turned to stalk slowly toward its fallen prey.

Twilight tried to stagger back to her feet, but her shoulder was covered in blood, and the injured foreleg just wouldn't support her weight. She cried out as she collapsed back to the cold floor—a high, agonized sound that set my teeth on edge. Power began to gather in my horn, thrumming up from the floor, through my whole skeleton, pulsing against the backs of my eyes as I readied myself to destroy her attacker before it was too late.

I'm not quite sure what held me back.

Maybe it was the certainty in Twilight's eyes when she had turned around, that still shone there now, despite her injury. Maybe my eye caught something in the way the pink cat moved. Maybe it was just belated horror at the memory of the creatures I'd already killed. Whatever it was, I paused before unleashing that strike, watching the great cat close in on the injured pony.

Twilight lay very still, eyes fixed on her attacker, soft moans of anguish punctuating every panting breath. "I know you," she groaned. "You're kind. You care. Unh. You don't want to hurt people. You want to ease their pain."

There was something the slightest bit off about the sounds Twilight was making. Not that she wasn't in real pain—she certainly was—but somehow it struck me that she was exaggerating for effect; pushing out more noise, and making a bigger physical show of her injury than she absolutely had to. This is, of course, exactly the _wrong_ tack to take with any predator, as I could tell you from long experience. Yet it had an unexpected effect on the Flutter-cat. She came in cautiously. Almost hesitant, but not with the wary tension of a predator closing on her kill. More uncertain. Curious even.

The cat creature lowered her head as she got close, sniffing delicately at Twilight's bloody limb. Just as I was about ready to call it a wash and unleash hell anyway, she reached out and delicately licked the wound. Once. Then again. Then she settled down to the floor, studiously cleaning away the blood from Twilight's shoulder. Twilight sighed, and rested her chin on one of Fluttershy's paws, murmuring, "Thank you. Thank you. I knew you'd understand."

I felt the tension draining out of me, and my thinking shifted gears. Now that she wasn't attacking, I could probably manage to drop a sleep spell on her, help keep her from relapsing while we got the rest of this mess straightened out.

And then a short scream of warning rang out, in an unfamiliar girl's voice, and something with the approximate speed and mass of a bullet train hit me from behind.

The preliminary impact was followed by an even sharper one as the unexpected tackle drove me sideways into the wall of the room. I felt my ribs creak and flex in the flashing moment of compression, and then my attacker was bouncing away, and I was twisting to train my horn on it: yet another huge cat creature, mostly pale with tiger stripes in half a dozen different colors. I gulped a breath, my battered lungs screaming at me, and roared, _"Forzare!"_

A cannonball of force followed my looping gesture, scooping down under the great cat's forelegs—crashing into it right at the point where sternum and wing muscles would create the sturdiest defense for its more delicate innards—and catapulted the creature up into the air, into the top of the half-crumbled wall and through it, off into the forest beyond. A horrendous rushing crash of flailing, breaking branches accompanied its furious yowl.

Gulping in a few more gallons of air past my protesting ribs, I glanced back to check on Twilight and her half-tamed friend. The pink cat hardly seemed to have noticed the scuffle, but the pony was staring at me in horror. "Oh take a chill pill, kid, she's fine!" I grumped. "Can't you hear her out there?"

I swung around, checking the rest of the room. "Two found, one to go, right?"

"Rainbow?" a young, unfamiliar voice cried out from the better-lit room we'd been heading toward, and I trotted over to the doorway to investigate. To my surprise, I found myself back in the entry hall where we'd first been jumped. And standing just inside the central doorway—the one Fluttershy had come from—was an orangey pony with a blonde mane tied back in a ragged ponytail—which ought to be illegal for the sheer dizzying self-reference if you ask me—with, of all things, a battered cowboy hat perched on her head, just behind her ears.

I tilted my head, thinking back to Pinkie Pie's brief descriptions. "Applejack, right?"

She nodded warily, shifting sideways a bit, to the accompaniment of a heavy, metallic clanking. "Who're y'all? An' what happened to Rainbow Dash?" she asked with a charming Texas drawl. How many universes were we away from Texas? _Never mind, Harry, just go with it._

"I'm Harry. Your other friends and I are here to rescue you. She'll be okay, I just got her out of the way for the moment." I approached the last of the prisoners carefully, wary of any more surprises. Why hadn't she been transformed like the others? "Why weren't you transformed like the others?"

"Ah reckon he didn't have much use for earth ponies in his grand army. Least-wise, that's what he said." She lifted a back leg and gave a rattle of the manacle and chain that held it. "So he jest locked me up here with Fluttershy and Rainbow. Said they'd eat me once they got hungry enough." She snorted. "He don't know my friends as well as he thinks he does."

I bent down to take a closer look at her restraint. It looked sturdy, but not excessively so. There was a lock of some sort on the manacle (hoofacle?) but I doubted the key would be anywhere nearby. "Hold still a minute, let me get this off you," I said. She squared her feet and stood calmly. I put one foot on the last few links of chain next to her ankle, then bent to wedge the tip of my horn through the next link in line. I took a moment to concentrate and double-check the numbers, then unleashed a carefully focused force spell—just enough to shatter that link.

I hissed as a couple of slivers of red-hot metal flicked across the hoof I was using to hold it down, but it was more surprise than pain. They hurt less than a bee-sting. I pulled my hoof away and gave Applejack some room. "There you go. Now we should probably get out of here, if there isn't anybody else around who needs rescuing."

"Nah, jest us I guess. Where's everypony else?"

"Twilight!" I called. "It's time to get out of here. Can you bring your friend along?"

"Yes, Sir Harry. I think so," she responded, and a moment later she and Fluttershy squeezed through the doorway together, Twilight walking awkwardly on her rear legs, her injured foreleg draped over the big yellow cat's back. "Applejack! You're okay! We were so worried!"

"Ah'm all right. Mighty grateful for the rescue though, sugar cube."

"Yeah, well, the rescue's not done yet," I pointed out. "There's still Rainbow to corral, and about a dozen less friendly cats to deal with." Plus Pinkie and Rarity to save, if it wasn't too late. "Stay behind me, okay?"

I got nods from the two ponies and a vaguely interested look from the cat and called it good, heading to the steps and back out into the clearing. From the darkened building I heard Applejack murmuring to her friend in a tone not intended to be overheard, "Who is this guy, anyway?"

"He's…a specialist," I heard Twilight respond.

"A specialist at whut?"

"Um. Rescues? And mayhem."

I tried not to listen any longer, just headed out of the building, my senses on high alert for all the other players who should be around here somewhere.

The only scent I could detect was the overwhelming tang of charred meat from the two burnt corpses nearby. I didn't see anything moving in the clearing, or within the visible verge of the woods around us, but there were crashing noises and the rustling of brush coming from a couple of different directions. I looked around uncertainly, wondering how in the world we would be able to link back up with our other companions, preferably without summoning every last foe as well. I gritted my teeth and ground through the logic. Getting all of the little ponies together in one place where I'd have a better chance of defending them was a higher priority than trying to avoid the hunting cat creatures. It had to be. So I turned my face up to the sky and took another page from my apprentice's book.

A moment's concentration and a swarm of multicolored sparks burst forth from the tip of my horn, shooting up into the air through the tree canopy in a spreading cone of bright, glittering color—first one in several shades of pink, then another in a splash of indigo and white light.

"Well, that should get their attention," I muttered to myself, then raised my voice to call over my shoulder. "Okay, gals. The coast is clear for the moment. Get yourselves out here." The three of them appeared at the top of the steps. "Twilight, can you find the trail we broke coming in?"

"Yes. I can." She was still leaning her injured leg on Flutter-cat's back, but she only sounded a little shaky.

"Good. You head out, get yourselves far away from here as quick as you can. I'll bring up the rear, try and link up with the other two if they're still out here."

"You mean the other _three_?"

"Yeah. About that," I said, just as the rainbow-striped monster came crashing back out of the brush straight ahead of me. _"Forzare,"_ I snapped again, and sent the cat flying through the air over our heads, hopefully with just enough force to clear the crumbling building. "I have a feeling she'll be tagging along. Now get _going!_"

Obediently, the two ponies began hurrying off toward the edge of the clearing we'd come from, and the giant pink and yellow cat crept along with them, pliable enough for the moment. I shoved aside any worry that she'd revert to more carnivorous behaviors, as being too far down the list to waste time on just now. The important thing was all the crashing and roaring coming toward us.

I took up the rear of our little formation, trying to keep as close an eye on our surroundings as I could without backing up the whole way. I could have called up another veil, but they're very demanding of concentration—for me, at least—and I had a feeling that I'd need to conserve my strength for the inevitable fight ahead.

Sure enough, the sounds converging on our position took on sharper, clearer tones over the next few moments. In amongst the rustle and crash of brush and the brutish growling of the flock—pride? Pack? Herd? What was the right collective noun for giant cats with feathered wings, anyway? A mythology?—I distinctly heard a cheerful young voice raised in song.

"Oh, there were three mares from Trottingham, all skipping along in time,  
>When one of them said to the other two, this is the silliest rhyme:<br>Oh break up the beets with hard cheese, mutter wherever you climb,  
>And trample your cares you grassy mares, laughter is ever sublime!"<p>

"Pinkie," I muttered. "Got to be." And felt a grin spreading across my face at the sound. She was still okay, and Rarity must be all right too, or she wouldn't be so happy, surely? A moment later my hypothesis was confirmed as the two of them burst out of the woods to my left. Rarity was galloping for all she was worth while Pinkie Pie bounced along in an accelerated version of Pepé Le Pew's bounding stride, somehow making Rarity work to keep up.

Behind them, a veritable wave of brightly colored cat creatures rolled into view, the closest no more than a dozen yards back. I turned to face the onslaught, legs braced, and waited for all of them to make it out into the open, taking the time to gather in power. "Rarity! Pinkie! This way!" I shouted, and the two of them turned toward me, the horde hot on their heels. I kept pulling in power as the two little ponies raced toward me, and it built up in a sizzling ache all through my bones. Finally, when they were maybe ten yards from me and it looked as though all of the pursuing creatures had made it out of the woods into the open ground behind them, I yelled out, "Now,_ duck!_"

Pinkie took no notice, still bounding straight toward my position, but Rarity's eyes flew wide, and she pounced on her friend in mid-leap, flattening both of them to the ground. As soon as they were on their way down I unleashed another spell with a bellowed, _"forzare!"_ and an exaggerated toss of my head. The rush of invisible force slewed out in a broad wave that passed right over them and slammed into the entire pack of cats. The bunch of them were lifted and tossed tail over teakettle into one another and the tangling tree branches all along the edge of the clearing.

As soon as the spell's energy left me I began to sag, my knees wobbling as I fought to remain standing. I hadn't put enough power in any one place to seriously injure any of the creatures this time—I couldn't in all conscience do that now that I knew that any of them might be more of Celestia's subjects transformed—but it had added up to a lot, and all the efforts of the past few hours and minutes were beginning to seriously tax my reserves.

Rarity glanced over her shoulder at the wild tangle of cat creatures now variously dangling from the trees, hopped up off of her friend's back, and the two of them hurried once more to meet me.

"Keep going!" I called to them, twitching my horn in the direction that Twilight and company had disappeared. "I'll take the rear."

Rarity nodded, clearly too winded to bother speaking, and pushed herself back into a labored gallop. Pinkie pranced past me, cool as a cucumber still, and sang out, "Did you like my distraction, Harry?"

"Yeah, Pinkie Pie," I said, turning to follow them away from the charred clearing and the regrouping band of monsters. "It worked out better than I expected. Now let's get gone while we still can."

"Okey-dokey, Loki!"

I hesitated for a moment, watching her curly pink tail vanish into the brush. "Well _that_ explains a lot."

And that, of course, was when the Rainbow-cat fell on me. Literally. One moment I was progressing smoothly towards our escape route after five of my supposed charges. The next I was more than half buried under about five hundred pounds of the sixth. All the air was squashed out of my lungs in an instant and the cat's big claws did their best to dig into me: one at the front of my chest, the other across my backside, right over the goofy markings. Once again, my transmuted coat held me in good stead, keeping my hide un-pierced. But then the huge, well-fanged mouth clamped down over the top of my head.

The coat doesn't cover my head. Never has. Sharp teeth pricked along my neck and against both sides of my face—inches from my oversized eyes—and nothing blunted them. I froze. Another half-second's pressure and I was going to be an ex-wizard. (Again.)


	7. Chapter 7

**New Tactics**

For the space of one long breath, nothing moved at all. And then—

"Oh, _Rain_-bow!" a high, cheerful voice caroled from very close by, as something whizzed past me and smacked right into the giant cat's nose. Pinkish powder puffed out in a cloud, stinging my eyes and making my nose itch. It had a much more severe impact on the Rainbow-cat. I felt her mouth twitch once, lips tightening against the back of my jaw, and then she sneezed—a huge explosion that loosened her grip and catapulted my face straight into the ground.

A tremendous improvement in my opinion.

Half-a-dozen more explosive sneezes followed on the heels of the first, and they shifted the cat creature's weight enough that I was able to squirm out from underneath her and stagger a few steps away. I let off a couple of pretty solid ones myself before I managed to get my breathing under control again.

By that time, the rainbow-striped cat was coming back to her senses. Her paws gathered under her, wings spread to launch again, as she dispersed the last of the sneezing powder with a fierce shake of her head.

A bright, burbling laugh pealed through the air around us, drawing the cat's attention and mine to the source of the joke shop attack: Pinkie Pie stood facing us, just a stone's throw down the trail, mouth gaping in a wide grin, her tail wagging like a big happy dog's. When she had the Rainbow-cat's attention, she dropped her head and shoulders, forelegs braced wide, butt sticking up into the air, tail twitching just like a puppy begging to play, and shouted, "Betcha can't catch _me-e!_"

Rainbow-cat cocked her head to one side for a second, snorted like an accelerating steam engine, then pounced forward with all the speed and deadly intent of the jungle cat she resembled. Pinkie darted off into the woods to one side of our trail lickety-split, her joyful laughter belling back to us the whole while. The cat crashed into the underbrush after her without hesitation.

I shook off the last of my own sneezing fit and hurried down the trail, eyes searching out the rest of the ponies while my ears swiveled wildly, trying to keep track of Pinkie Pie and her pursuer. The others stood together just atop the next rise, watching me approach. "Oh, thank goodness," Twilight said. The little purple pony who'd dragged me into all this was standing on her own again, although she still looked a little wobbly on her injured leg. "For a moment there I thought you were a goner."

"Yeah, me too," I muttered. "Now we just have to save Pinkie. Again."

"I have an idea about that," Twilight said. "But I might need help."

I nodded and opened my mouth to respond, happy to try out someone else's ingenuity for a change. Mine wasn't exactly having the best of days.

"Rarity," she continued, turning slightly away from me. "You know how you weave those wonderful bird's nests at Winter Wrap-up?" I shut my mouth with a snap, feeling unsupportably miffed.

The elegant purple and white pony nodded her head attentively, and Twilight continued, "Well, I need you to help me weave the branches along our trail into barriers, to help keep the cats from dropping down on us like that again."

"Ah! I see. Yes, of course, Twilight." And the two unicorns set to work, grabbing onto the nearby tree branches with their magic and twining them into quick and dirty barriers to aerial passage.

I watched, concentrating on keeping my mouth from flopping open in amazement at how swiftly and smoothly dozens and dozens of branches tangled themselves together into an impassable barrier above and around us. It would've taken me—at the least—long minutes of preparation and ritual to manage something anywhere near that complex. I'll tell you, it was enough to make a guy feel downright inadequate. Even if he was still anatomically correct.

"Yeah, that's all well and good as long as we stay right here," I grumbled. "But how's it going to help us get _away?_"

Unsurprisingly, no-one answered me. But a moment later I felt a solid nudge in my ribs, and looked around to see the pink and yellow flap-cat blinking curiously at me from just a few feet away. I frowned, wondering what her expression really meant. Was she trying to introduce herself, or considering my qualifications as a snack? Frowning, I concentrated for a moment, watching her, and opened my wizard's Sight.

Immediately the world brightened and danced with colors and patterns that had nothing to do with familiar reality, cartoonish or otherwise, and everything to do with the presence and cycles of magic in the world. The trees around us glowed and pulsed with the deep green energy of sap flowing from roots, through trunks and into the fractal traceries of their branches—somehow clearly highlighted past the concealing green blobs of 'leaves.' The edges of the elaborate tapestry being woven by Rarity and Twilight above and behind me were a plum and violet imposition on those natural shapes, but one with its own intricate structure.

Before me, where a moment ago had loomed a buff-colored, lion-like winged cat with a ragged pale pink ruff, there now stood a fine-boned and bashful little yellow pegasus mare, her delicately wavy pink mane and tail trailing almost to the ground, her huge green eyes watching me with a rabbit's wariness. Above and around her, still holding the shape of the menacing cat, was a ragged, hollow shell: a bilious green construct like a Papier-mâché mask from one of those achingly avant-garde puppet shows they like so much in Las Vegas and Canada. Its teeth were bared in a fierce fighting grimace, its paws raised to strike, but the sweet-faced little pony stared out from beneath it like a child dressed up for Halloween.

"Oh, now that's just not right," I muttered, half to her, half to myself. "Let's get this off you." I reached out with a cautious tendril of power, grabbing onto a loose edge of the construct mask and tugging it up, away from the pony inside. There was immediate resistance, getting stronger as I pulled, and in between Fluttershy and the enveloping spell I made out a network of straps and buckles; a spider's web of attachments, some wrapping around her, some apparently digging deep under her skin. Still holding the outward pressure on the construct, I produced a couple more fine threads of magic, sharp-edged as scalpels, and began slicing away at the straps. As I did, the entangled pony twitched and shivered, but stayed frozen in place, her feet planted.

It only took a few moments to separate the infernal thing from its victim. I got the distinct impression that it had been very poorly fitted. As soon as it came free from her, I crushed it into a shapeless wad with my imagined manipulating appendages and tossed it into the open air just above me. "_Fuego,_" I hissed, pointing my horn at it, and watched in satisfaction as the ugly crumpled thing was instantly engulfed in flame, disintegrating in a moment to fine shreds of ash and then nothing. The little yellow pegasus gave one soft, relieved sigh and then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed to the ground. "Shit." I hurried to close my Sight again, and moved to check on her.

By the time I had managed that the orange pony, miss Breakfast Cereal, was standing over her, one fore-hoof pressed carefully to her neck. "Whut happened to her?" she demanded, glaring up at me.

I get no appreciation, I swear. "I took the transformation spell off her. I guess it took a lot out of her too." The yellow pegasus was breathing normally, and I could feel her slow, steady heartbeat when I pressed a hoof alongside Applejack's. "She probably just needs some rest. She'll be fine," I said, with maybe a touch more assurance than I really felt. "Now we just need to–"

"There," Twilight announced from behind me. "That should do it for now. Oh!" I glanced over my shoulder to see her and Rarity looking back at me. The entire area around three sides of us on the trail and arching all the way overhead was completely obstructed by a neatly woven barrier of sticks and branches, except for a couple of spaces maybe the height of their shoulders where little mouse-holes had been left at ground level. "Oh good, you reversed it! Thank you, Sir Harry."

"Yeah, yeah. Thank me later. We've got a lot more of those things to worry about still. And the basket weaving project is pretty and all, but I don't see how it's going to help."

"That's because there's more to it," she said, then called, much louder, "Oh, Pinkie! Circle left, do-si-do!"

"Okey-dokey, Loki!" A bubbling giggle answered her from somewhere out in the woods.

Twilight nodded firmly. "Now we get ready to move. Sir Harry, can you carry Fluttershy?"

I nodded absently, trying to puzzle out what the purple unicorn had planned. Another gentle surge of force magic lifted the unconscious pegasus up off the ground, and deposited her across my back, her toes hanging down to knee-height on either side. Then I followed the other three little ponies as they all clustered near the solid back of the cage of branches.

Crashing and giggling approached, and moments later Pinkie Pie appeared on the trail ahead, the stripy blue flap-cat hard on her heels. She turned and raced straight toward us, finally stretching from her weirdly casual bounce into a serious, flat-out gallop.

"Now," Twilight called, "Out the back!" And she turned and ducked through one of the little open spaces, quickly followed by Rarity and Applejack. I lifted the limp Fluttershy off my back and shoved her through one of the holes ahead of me, then ducked and squirmed to get myself out.

Did I mention that my pony form was quite a bit bigger than Twilight and her pals? Yeah. I got stuck. I pushed Fluttershy a few feet further along and dug in my heels and elbows, fighting to drag my shoulders through the tight little hole, but it just wasn't happening. Applejack saw my predicament and shouted to the others. Then she and Rarity turned back and grabbed onto my front legs, pulling for all they were worth. The branches started to give a little, as the Rainbow-cat let out a huge, angry roar—from _right_ behind me—and then a warm weight cannoned into my backside. The barrier gave with a crackling rush and Pinkie and I came tumbling through, knocking my helpers over and winding us all up in a tangled heap of legs.

The cat creature roared again, clawing and digging furiously at the barrier between us, fruitlessly shoving a head twice the width of my shoulders at the little opening. From further off, I heard a sharp rustle of moving tree branches and Twilight's elated cry. I finally managed to extricate myself from the heap of helpful ponies and turned to see that Twilight had circled around and closed off the last side of the branch barrier, penning the Rainbow-cat inside.

"Ah ha! It's a trap!" I crowed, finally enlightened. Although seeing how hard the cat was going at it, I wasn't making any bets on how long it would last.

"Now, Sir Harry," Twilight called breathlessly from the far side of the makeshift cage. "Can you change her back too?"

"Right," I said. "Just let me know when the rest of them catch up with us, okay?" And I summoned up my Sight again.

The creature on the other side of the barrier didn't look as different to my Sight as Fluttershy had. Rather than a loose-fitting chinese dragon of a construct, her transformative spell reminded me of a modern full body costume for a big-budget Hollywood movie. Layers and layers of foreign material wrapped around the original being, so thick and solid that I could barely see her at all. Here a perky pony ear peeked out from the feline mane, there a smooth curve of hoof protruded between big cat claws. This would be worlds trickier to deal with, and she was clearly not going to hold still for it either.

"This one's a way better job." I swore. "It's going to take me a while."

Branches cracked and snapped under the cat creature's assault, and from the corner of my eye I saw the other ponies flinch back. I gathered my reserves and reached out with a single fine blade of magic, taking a cautious swipe at a thick section of 'costume' at the broad cheekbone of the cat. Latex-like false flesh parted, and the cat jerked back with a howl of pain. What looked like real blood welled up from the cut.

"Oh, hell. That won't do," I growled. "I don't know what's different! It's not coming off."

That's when I heard another howl from another huge feline throat. That one was joined by half a dozen more, and I knew we'd run out of time. I bowed my head and forced my Sight closed again, and by the time I'd looked up the leading members of the pack were visible down the trail, bounding toward us at top speed.

"Donch'a think we'd best run away now?" the orange pony commented, with surprising calm.

"But what about Dashy?" Pinkie Pie wailed.

"They don't want _her_," I barked, heaving the limp yellow one up onto my back again. "They want us. She'll be fine, now come on!"

We scampered around the side of the briar cage, meeting up with Twilight again, then racing off into the woods, and retraced our path. We weren't even out of view yet when a final thunderous crash shook the woods, and I glanced back to see the Rainbow-cat extricating herself from a tangled mass of broken branches. Then she leapt into pursuit, just as bloodthirsty as the rest.

"Sir Harry," Twilight panted, keeping pace right next to me, "Why didn't you free Rainbow when we had her trapped?"

"I tried, kid," I said. "I couldn't. There was something different about the spell. It was a lot stronger. Better attached." I cudgeled my brain for a moment, and a light went on. "Or the first one was weaker. Like maybe something had damaged the spell on Fluttershy before I got to it? I don't know."

Twilight stared at me with those huge purple eyes for a long moment, never missing a step in her headlong run. "Kindness," she said.

"What?"

"She's the spirit of Kindness. A personification of friendship. We all are, the six of us." She nodded her head, following a personal chain of logic that seemed clear and inevitable to her and made no sense whatsoever to me. Huh. Was this how Murphy felt when she watched me figuring out magic stuff? If so, I suddenly felt a lot more empathy for her. It's no fun being clueless.

"That's it!" Applejack crowed from just behind us. "Loyalty! Ah got this, y'all! We'll rescue Rainbow yet." Without a pause she reared up and spun on one heel, swinging around a hundred and eighty degrees to charge straight back down the narrow path toward the oncoming horde of cats, her ponytail tail streaming in the wind of her passage. "Keep goin'. Ah'll catch up with ya!"

I slid to a scrambling halt in the middle of our trail and turned around—more carefully, so I wouldn't drop my comatose burden—watching her charge headlong toward the wall of feline flesh. I heard all three of the other girls stop as well. We might have known better, but we couldn't just leave her so soon, give up on one of the very people we'd come so far to rescue.

The closest cat—a tall, slender, greenish one with hard, angry eyes—was no more than a stone's throw away from her when Applejack turned ninety degrees and raced off into the trackless woods. Greeny and two of his cohorts went after her, and the howling Rainbow-cat followed close behind. The rest of them kept coming straight toward us.

"Enough of this shit," I growled, rage welling up in my chest again. I watched the pack of angry cat things closing in on us, and gathered up my will for one last push, tapping into the icy well of power granted to me by Queen Mab as well. "_Infriga ligatio!_" I howled, and the cool damp forest air suddenly dried and tightened against my skin as the huge spell sucked in all the available water for hundreds of feet around, solidifying in an instant into dozens of lances of bitterly cold ice; springing up from the forest floor, stabbing out from among the surrounding tree branches, interlocking themselves into a prison far more solid and cruel than any woven of wood could possibly be.

None of the thrusting icicles pierced flesh, I made certain of that. But they sliced in close—cold and sharp and confining, limiting the great cats' movements and binding them in place unless they chose to risk tearing into their own hides to attempt escape. Some of them started to, but the cold of deepest Winter is like no natural cold, and the inescapable agony of it changed their minds fast.

I watched the enemy writhe and twist for a long moment, and snorted in satisfaction at what I saw. My breath plumed, white fog in the sudden chill. "There. They're not going anywhere for a while." I glanced back at the three little ponies behind me then started after Applejack, doing my best to ignore their variously stunned expressions. "Now let's go save your friends."

"Wait." Twilight's voice was low but calm as she nodded down our path in the opposite direction, back toward Ponyville. "I think I know where AJ's going. We can meet up with her further on." After a moment's hesitation I nodded and turned around, trusting her to know her friend and these woods better than I did.

Not more than a quarter of a mile later we came upon a spot where our path had curved around the edge of a mostly barren hillside that deteriorated in places into sections of impassably steep cliff face. It was a good thing we had run across the area well after dawn the first time or I might have ended up at the bottom.

We started to pick our way back along the flatter sections of the slope, but Twilight seemed to be paying more attention to the far horizon than the treacherous ground beneath her own feet. I didn't worry about it too much at first, busy forging ahead slowly and carefully through the somewhat hazardous terrain. Then I heard a bit of a scuffle and turned to see that Rarity had thrust herself between the distracted unicorn and a sharp drop-off, apparently preventing her from tumbling over by main force.

"Darling, you simply _must_ pay more attention to where you are!" she scolded gently. "I know you're worried about Applejack and Rainbow Dash, but they certainly wouldn't want you to let yourself get hurt."

Twilight stopped in the middle of the path, and simply stared out across the broad, pastel-hued landscape that spread out before us, and the long ragged curve of the hillside trailing off behind. "I was sure she was headed there," she murmured to herself. "But she should have arrived already. What if I–"

There came a sudden crashing from the forest back behind us, and several figures burst out of the woods, barreling at top speed toward the tallest section of the cliff, a few hundred yards away.

Applejack was in the lead by maybe ten or twelve lengths, followed closely by the same four cats. The little orange pony skittered to a hasty stop at the very edge of the cliff, turning to face her pursuers head on. The cats slowed down and fanned out around her, suddenly wary—as most predators will become when their prey stops running. Rainbow-cat stood among them, her body language indistinguishable from the other three avid felines: head low, wings half-spread, tail lashing with a slow, hungry rhythm. Applejack stared straight at the stripy blue cat creature, hardly seeming to notice the others. Her head bobbed up and down, mouth moving as though she were speaking to her friend; pleading with her. There was no chance of hearing her words from where the four of us stood.

I glanced down at the delicate little fillies around me, watching the confrontation with mingled hope and fear in their eyes, and wondered whether they were seeing their friend's last moments, and what it would do to their gentle souls if that were the case.

I felt my jaw muscles clench, simmering anger coalescing into a sharp determination—that would _not_ happen on my watch. No matter what it took.

As far as I could tell, Applejack's words were falling on deaf ears. The cats paced slowly closer to her, their ring tightening. She shuffled backwards, half-steps on the bare, dry dirt that kicked a few pebbles over the edge, to tumble and bounce the long empty way to the floor of the valley, but she kept up her pleading, eyes locked on the eyes of the stripy blue cat.

I planted my feet firmly, beginning to call up my magic once again. It came to me sluggishly, weighed down with fatigue, and I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do with it when I got it together. My grasp of the finer points of evocation has always been a touch shaky at best, and both the pony and her assailants were a long way away from me. Evocations can theoretically be aimed anywhere within line of sight, but in practice they tend to lose focus and peter out the farther they get from the caster. Most of the time, my enemies are doing their damnedest to crawl down my throat before I have a chance to fight back, and I'd never actually tried to throw a spell at a target more than maybe a hundred feet off. The distance separating us now was easily ten times that.

Applejack lost a little more ground, her focus still entirely fixed on her friend. Then one back leg shuffled too far and slipped out over open air. She scrambled, but seemed to have lost her balance entirely. One fore-hoof reaching out desperately, eyes still locked on the Rainbow-cat's, she slid backwards and shot straight out into empty space. "Help!" Her scream was so loud that it echoed clearly all the way to my ears.

"No!" Raw denial ripped from all three of my companions' throats in a single terrified chorus, and I'm not sure I didn't join them. I know I took a step toward the cliff edge myself, for all the good it would do.

But _someone_ did act, in the split second after the cowgirl pony fell.

Fast as lightning, the Rainbow-cat lunged forward, a single agile bound sending her off the cliff edge and into a swift, elegant dive. Two flaps of her huge feathered wings and she'd caught up to the falling pony, snatching her up in those massive jaws and pulling out of the dive to soar smoothly up into the open air.

I didn't honestly see a huge improvement for Applejack in the difference between street pizza and cat food, but all three of my companions cheered wildly at this turn of events. Pinkie Pie bounced up and down so enthusiastically that she nearly went off the cliff herself, but a swift grab of her tail by Rarity prevented it. What was it with these girls and biting each others' tails, anyway?

The other three cat creatures on the edge of the cliff face launched themselves into the air a moment later, presumably to get their share of the feast. The Rainbow cat flapped harder, pulling back into a steep rise that swiftly left the others in her dust. Then with a flick of her head, she launched her mouthful of pony into the air in front of herself, powered into a loop the loop and—before I could even get properly terrified for Applejack again—neatly slid underneath the falling pony, ducking to catch her on her back as though it was a trick they'd pulled together a thousand times. Applejack landed in the space just ahead of the Rainbow-cat's wings and immediately wrapped one fore-leg tightly around the cat creature's thick neck. Then she raised her ridiculous cowboy hat in the other, waving it over her head and hollering like a triumphant bronco buster.

This time I cheered too.

Once she was done show-boating, Applejack wrapped both forelegs around the cat's thick neck and guided it gently down toward us by the simple expedient of tugging on its whiskers.

Of course, the other three loose cats followed hot on their heels, but I figured there was something I could do about _that_. "Get back from the cliff, girls," I said. "You be ready to help your friends, I'll take care of the others. Just stay out of the way."

"You can't _hurt_ them, Sir Harry," Twilight insisted. "They're–"

"I know, kid," I interrupted her. "I know. Nothing more than a few bumps and bruises, I promise. Just help your friends."

I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye, but kept my focus on the approaching felines and the energy spiraling up through my skeleton once again.

Rainbow and her passenger swooped in fast, passing close enough over my head to blow my stubby mane out sideways. She landed on the slope just behind me at a nearly unmanageable gallop and charged straight into the woods. That put the other three cat creatures on a high-speed collision course with yours truly. Heh. Right where I wanted them.

It had been a long day already and I didn't have a whole lot of juice left, magic rich environment or no. Which was fine, really, because I didn't want to blast them out of the sky. I just needed to keep them from following us. So as the three cats closed in I shaped my will into three small, precise darts of pure force, lashing out not at each thick-muscled body, but at the relatively delicate construction of each creature's left wing.

I was rewarded with a rippling chorus of sickening crackles, sudden howls of feline pain, and three large objects crashing hard into the trees to my right.

I held myself entirely still for a moment, listening, but all three cats continued their angry, agonized yowling. Well-pleased, I turned and hurried to catch up with the others.

Twilight had hung back, and was waiting for me just under the spreading leaves of the first trees, glaring for all she was worth. "Okay, so maybe a broken bone or two," I answered, shrugging. "Nothing they can't recover from eventually." She kept up the glare for a moment longer, then shook her head and got moving as I passed her.

"You have a strange sense of honor, Sir Harry."

"Didn't I tell you to stop calling me that?"


	8. Chapter 8

**New Worries**

We emerged from the Everfree Forest with no further incidents, although it took us until nearly sundown.

We'd eaten lightly on the move, but Twilight and I both had no intention of stopping before we got closer to civilization. The Rainbow-cat had deposited Applejack safely with her other friends, then alternately followed along with the rest of us and took to the sky around us; maybe scouting for more foes, or maybe just reveling in the pure joy of flight, I couldn't tell. Although, I can't _think_ of any real value five barrel-rolls in a row might have for sentry duty.

When we finally got to the edge of the heavy woods, we passed once more into that thick, spirit-syrupy atmosphere that the ponies found so obviously comforting and I welcomed about as much as a gold lamé straight-jacket. Rainbow-cat noticed it too, shying and dancing for a moment—more like a nervous horse than like any feline I've ever seen—but stepped into it without any more fuss than that.

We made our way over the first bridge across the cute little river, and Twilight finally called a halt. "Okay, this will do," she said, casting a single nervous glance back at the tree-lined horizon. "We all need some rest, and _Sir_ Harry needs a chance to try and fix Rainbow Dash again."

I nodded acknowledgement, and laid the still-sleeping Fluttershy on a mound of soft-looking grass. "Come here, miss, let's get a look at you," I said, gently herding the Rainbow-cat away from the rest of the ponies. She watched me with an impatient wariness. "Just make yourself comfortable. This shouldn't take too long, if your friends were right." From her altered behavior, I was fairly certain of it.

With one more narrow-eyed stare, the brightly striped cat creature settled down in the grass, forelegs casually crossed, and waited, watching me. I took a couple of deep breaths, closed my eyes for a moment and brought up my Sight once again.

"Hah!" I said, the moment I Saw her. "That's more like it."

Gone was the high-tech Hollywood costume. In its place I saw a bright-eyed, athletic looking blue pegasus pony with a rainbow-striped mane and tail, half-buried in the cracked and flaking mass of a cat-shaped ceramic statue. Carefully, I set to work removing it. It wasn't as easy as Fluttershy's reversal had been, but the project was straightforward enough. I just had to be more careful not to injure her as I pulled away the foreign matter of the spell.

As each ragged chunk of imaginary clay was separated from her, it cracked and dissolved into green sparkles and air, until finally nothing was left but the cute pony, looking tired but peaceful.

By the time I got my Sight buttoned up again, she was out just as cold as the yellow one. I watched her for a moment, till I'd satisfied myself that her breathing was deep and regular. Then I just rolled over on my back with a sigh and closed my eyes for a minute.

"Sir Harry. Sir Harry!" I blinked awake to an uncomfortably pointy pressure in my side, and Twilight's irritated voice. She sounded as though she'd been calling my name for a while.

"Yeah. I'm up. Stop poking me," I grumped, smacking away the thick sleep-film over my tongue. I got another jab in the short ribs for my troubles. "Ow!"

"That's what you said the last three times!" Twilight grumbled. She sounded annoyed, but not frightened, so we probably weren't under attack. I briefly considered going back to sleep.

It was way more effort than it should have been to roll over and get my feet under me again. Maybe it was the long nap, or the vaguely remembered dreams, all of which had featured a bipedal me, but it seemed as though getting my balance in pony form was just as tough now as it had started out in Celestia's grand hall.

Celestia. Ponies. Murderous cat creatures carrying off pegasi to turn into more cat creatures. Oh, yeah. I still had some work to do.

The night was well on, but the full moon rode high and bright. We were still on the hill above the river, the deeper shadow that was the heavy forest just in sight on the opposite side, six ponies in various states of readiness surrounding me. Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash were still unconscious, but the other four had their saddle-bags packed and looked ready to move out. Applejack was carrying the larger, undecorated set of packs I'd brought out from town... what, a day and a half ago? It seemed longer.

I squinted around, then at the two comatose rescuees. "How are we planning on moving them?" I asked.

Twilight blinked up at me as though that were the dumbest question she'd ever heard. I rolled my eyes. "Fine." Trying to balance both unconscious ponies on my back at once sounded possible, but unpleasant. I thought for a moment, then grinned and muttered, "I'm going to have to apologize to Will. I told him that spell was a waste of space." A gentle effort of will raised both sleeping ponies into the air, then I consolidated it into a shallow bowl, holding them comfortably off the ground, and tethered to trail along behind me as I walked without requiring too much continuing concentration. _Convenient floating disk_ indeed.

I have to admit, I couldn't have set up such an extended effect back home without way more effort—or perhaps an expenditure of soulfire—but it wasn't too tough here. It was almost as though the energy of the spell understood what I was asking of it. Kind of the way people who don't know any better tend to imagine that magic works. Hmph. Sorcerer's Apprentice territory.

Never mind. That wasn't important just now. "Alright kids, let's get this show on the road," I muttered.

We moved off once again, Twilight and Pinkie Pie in the lead; the one because she needed to be in charge, the other just because she had too much energy to be anywhere else. I followed behind them with my disk-full of gently snoring pegasi, and Applejack and Rarity brought up the rear.

The return trip to Ponyville was complicated slightly by a detour to collect the bodies of the two fallen ponies from the earlier attack. I would have preferred to skip undertaker duty, but I didn't have the heart to object. My four companions watched quietly from the top of the hill as I scooped up the majority of the two pathetic corpses in another disk with as much dignity as I could summon. Pinkie Pie volunteered her red and white checked picnic blanket to cover them, and we made the rest of the walk back to town in a somber silence.

I settled the two dead witnesses on a stretch of grass behind Twilight's tree house until they could be tended to properly. My living burdens we brought inside and settled in Twilight's main room upstairs, in front of the fireplace under a couple more blankets. Spike dragged himself out of his basket to fuss over them, and stayed up to watch over their rest. The rest of us retired downstairs to the library proper.

"So," I said, when everyone was settled and we'd polished off the snack Pinkie Pie had produced, apparently out of thin air. Including more leftover cake. "We've got your friends back, and they should be fine given a little time, but the bigger problem is still before us."

"Whut do ya mean, mister Harry?" Applejack asked. "Ah've been a bit out'a the loop these past days."

"It's the same thing you were trying to deal with before." I said. "We know a little more now; what form the attackers are taking, and where they're coming from. Namely your own people who've been kidnapped, at least in part. But that doesn't answer the important questions." I tried to tick off points on my hand and ran out after one. "Who's transforming them? What does he—or she—want? Where can we find him? And most importantly, how do we shut him down, and get the rest of those cats back to normal?"

"Does anyone have any ideas?" Twilight asked quietly.

I shook my head. "Not right this second. But I'm pretty sure there's something big here that I'm missing."

"What's that?" Pinkie Pie piped up.

I sighed, but Rarity beat me to the response. "If he _knew_ what he was missing, he wouldn't be _missing_ it, now would he, darling?" She fluttered her eyelashes at me and added, "I'm certain that it will come to you with a little time, Sir Harry."

"I hope so, because we don't have a whole lot."

"How do ya figure that?" Applejack asked.

"Look. We bloodied the bad guy's nose today, taking you three away from him, and messing up his other thugs." I deliberately didn't bring up the three I had taken out permanently before I knew any better, although my stomach knotted a bit just thinking about it. They might well have been too far gone to save, but there was no way we could know that now. I shook my head. _Stay on task, Harry. Now's not the time to beat yourself up._ "But that's most likely only going to make him more determined to reach his primary goal, whatever that is. Now that he knows we're onto him, he'll probably speed up his timetable as much as he can. Which means that unless we stop him quick there'll be more attacks. More deaths and disappearances. That's how this kind of murderous villain works." The entirety of my small pastel audience shivered at that statement.

"Sheesh. Even Discord wasn't this nasty," Applejack muttered, half to herself.

"It's true," Rarity said. "As many terrible creatures as we've faced together, none of them were ever so…savage."

I stared at Rarity in silence for a long moment. My exhaustion-fuzzed brain pawed vaguely at some important point to what she'd said, but I just couldn't grasp _what_. "Tell me more about that, would you?"

"What do you mean, Sir Harry?" she asked.

"Tell me about the other terrible creatures you've faced. Maybe it'll help me understand what I'm missing."

"Ooh! Ooh! If we're staying up late to tell scary stories, does that make this a sleepover?" Pinkie Pie enthused. " 'Cause the last time _somepony_ had a sleepover over here, _somepony_ didn't even think to invite _me!_" For some reason she followed this up with a surprisingly murderous glare for Twilight.

"I said I was sorry, Pinkie," Twilight replied, in the tone of one who feels she has apologized often enough but will do it one more time for the sake of her friendship. "It was a spur of the moment thing. I had no idea you were so incredibly serious about parties."

"How could you _not_ know I'm serious about parties? Hel-_lo_, party balloons for a cutie mark! I mean _really_. Do you know me _at all_?" Pinkie Pie was reared up on her back legs by the end of this tirade, gesturing indignantly at the tattoo of three colorful balloons on her flank. How the heck did she stand up like that so casually?

"You're right. I should have known. I–"

"But Pinkie dear, there was a _terrible_ storm out." Rarity stepped in. "The only reason we stayed here that night was because it was too _dangerous_ to go home. It would have been _far_ too dangerous to try and fetch you, or we most certainly would have done so."

"Yeah," Applejack piped up. "That party woulda' been worlds more fun with you there, sugar cube."

Rarity gave her a cool look and settled back down under the blanket she'd pulled out of her bag. It matched her mane very nicely. "I think sharing stories of our past exploits would be a very civilized way to pass the time." She broke out the eyelashes. "As long as Sir Harry tells us some of _his_, as well." Yikes.

"Uh. You first, if you would," I dodged. "It's more relevant."

"Ooh, Ooh, I want to go first!" Pinkie burst out, all ire apparently gone with the wind. "I'll tell you about the coolest bad guy yet. He turned the clouds into cotton candy and made it rain chocolate milk!"

"Yeah, an' he also turned every one of us aginst each other an' turned the whole durned town upsahd down!" Applejack protested hotly.

"Well, yeah," Pinkie admitted, then perked up again. "But you were really cute when you lied."

"Gee, thanks." The orange pony slumped down, her chin on her fore-legs, and stared into the fire. "Ah don't see much to like about whut Discord did, that's all."

"None of us do, Applejack," Twilight said firmly, then glared at Pinkie. "If you're going to tell Sir Harry about Discord, then you've got to do it right."

"Oh, sure! I can do that," she said. "It all started _thousands_ of years ago, when Celestia and Luna used the Elements of Harmony to overthrow Discord, who was ruling the world with a chocolate—I mean evil fist. They turned him to stone and left him in the castle garden as a reminder—Wait, that was kind of a dumb thing to do, wasn't it? I mean not the turning to stone part, but leaving him out where just anypony could bump into him and—"

"Maybe somepony else should tell the story, Pinkie Pie," Applejack interrupted. "Otherwise we'll be here all naht."

"But I thought it was the plan to be here all night, silly willy! That's what a slumber party's all about, didn't you know that?"

Twilight let out a long-suffering sigh. "She means that you'll never get through the story if you tell it like that, Pinkie Pie. Can you stick to the point, or does someone else need to take over?"

"Fine. But you guys are totally being party poopers here, I want you to know that!"

After that, Pinkie settled down some—about as much as she was capable of settling down, I think—and told a harrowing tale of theft, riddles, mazes, and some pretty terrifying mind magic, that ended with these six cute little girls—ponies—girls re-statuing the bad guy through the magical power of friendship.

I shit you not, that's what she said.

"And _that's_ the story of how I got my cutie mark!" she finished.

"Wait, what?"

"Never mind her, she's just being Pinkie Pie," Twilight said.

I shook that off and took another sip of my hot chocolate, contemplating the story. "So, wait. Somewhere in there you mentioned that Celestia couldn't use the Elements of Harmony any more because they were attuned to you now? How did that happen?"

"Oh, _that's_ the story of how we all met!" Twilight enthused. "And how I first learned about the magic of friendship. That adventure had plenty of monsters in it too." I nodded encouragement, but she didn't need it. She was off and running with a convoluted and detailed explanation of her first encounters with each of her five friends, the advent of a foe called Nightmare Moon, who turned out to be the same Luna who was Celestia's little sister but apparently— "So Luna was under some sort of curse, or transformation?" I interrupted.

Twilight hesitated for a moment. "Not as such. I don't think. As the story in my books goes, she was corrupted by envy and loneliness, but it wasn't really any _outside_ influence. I never quite got up the courage to ask Celestia for specifics."

"Ah. I'm sorry, please go on."

She continued, telling all about their first terrifying journey into the Everfree Forest, and all the obstacles that Nightmare Moon had thrown in their way, including a manticore with a thorn in its paw, a bunch of scary faces on trees—in the dark—and a tonsorially challenged river dragon who, from the sound of it, would make my half-brother Thomas's flamingly gay hairdresser persona look butch by comparison. I frowned as I listened, but declined to interrupt again. She went on to explain how they reached the old castle at the heart of the woods, discovered the Elements, which had apparently been turned to stone themselves somehow, and unlocked their power by recognizing their correspondence with the ponies as living representations of Kindness, Honesty, Laughter, Generosity, Loyalty, and Magic.

"Okay," I said carefully, once the congratulatory exclamations at the end of the tale had died down. "Let me ask you this: Have you guys ever been in a real _fight_ before now?"

Most of them looked kind of blank at that. After a moment, Applejack piped up, "One tahm, we went out to deliver an apple tree ta mah cousin Braeburn an' ended up in the middle of a range war."

She explained.

"A _pie_ fight?" I yelped. "Their solution to the attack was a _pie fight_?"

"Well, yeah," she said, sounding a little chagrined. "But as soon as chief Thunderhooves tasted that sweet apple pah, he changed his mind about wantin' all o' them apple trees gone, and we ended up settlin' things nice and civilized lahk."

I put my face in my hands—hooves—half choking on a mixture of laughter and disgust. "So the worst violence you'd ever seen before this mess was some half-assed bullying and a huge waste of perfectly good _desserts?_ No wonder you needed me so badly!" Something fell into place in my head with what should have been an audible click. I sat up very straight, staring at nothing. "No wonder you needed me…"

"What is it, Sir Harry?" Rarity asked.

"I get it now. Why your princess needed to bring in an outside gunslinger to handle this problem. She said it herself. You guys just aren't used to real violence." I sighed, shaking my head at my own obtuseness. "I assumed she just meant it the way most regular folks aren't used to serious fighting. They may never have experienced it for themselves, but they've thought about it, seen it on the news, and in movies—" I trailed off for a moment. "But you guys _really_ don't get it. Even your villains are basically gentle."

"What does that mean?" Twilight asked.

"Trouble. It means the source of your current problems is as much an outsider to your way of life as I am. Otherwise he and his minions could never be so violent. Not just bouncing folks around a little, but killing them, ruthlessly." I looked up into four pairs of extraordinarily large, utterly wide eyes and shook my head. "But that still doesn't tell me what he is, or what he wants. Means, motive and opportunity, right? But opportunity for what? Means to what end? He's wreaking havoc, scaring people, amassing an army of flying cat-things. Why? What's the point?"

I flopped down on my back and stared at the soot-darkened orange ceiling above the fireplace. "Maybe I'm just too tired to put it together. Is there someplace I can sack out for a few more hours?"

"My bed's freshly made up, Sir Harry," Twilight said. "You're welcome to it. We'll all stay down here tonight, I think." The other three made some noises of agreement. I rolled over, staggered back to my feet and took myself upstairs.

I checked on the two pegasi on my way. They were peacefully asleep still, and Spike was nodding off watching them. He jerked awake as my shadow flickered across his face. "Hey kid. Twilight said I could use her room to get some shut-eye. Go ahead and get some rest yourself. I'm sure they'll let you know if they need you."

He blinked at me uncertainly for a few moments, then nodded at the sense of this suggestion. "Yeah, you're right. Sleep well, Harry."

"You too kid."

Another, shorter staircase curved up over the fireplace to the open loft area where I found Twilight's bed. It was bigger than the one I'd slept in most of my adult life, and the sheets were clean and cool. My legs stuck off the end, but they always do.

The pillow didn't even have time to warm up before I was asleep.


	9. Chapter 9

**New Day**

Unforgivably bright, cheerful sunlight on my face awoke me, too few hours later. I groaned and rolled over, spilling myself onto the floor of the loft. By the time I'd clawed my way out of the tangle of sheets, Spike, the little purple dragon, was leaning over me, asking if I was okay.

"Yeah. Fine. Just woke up a little too fast there. Or too slow." I shook my head and staggered to my feet, once again having to forcibly drag my brain back into horizontal, four-legs-and-no-hands mode. "What time is it?"

"It's pretty early still. Applejack and I are the only ones up yet."

I nodded. "How are the other two doing?"

He glanced down into the main room. "Pretty much the same. They seem fine, but they haven't woken up at all yet."

"Give 'em time. They'll be okay." He nodded wordlessly and followed me as I made my unsteady way down the stairs. I paused to take a look at the two unconscious pegasi for myself, but noticed nothing new. In deference to their rest, I headed down the narrower flight of stairs to the library's main floor. Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Twilight lay variously sprawled under light blankets on the floor, faintly lit by a few fingers of sunlight coming in a side window. A fourth blanket had been neatly folded and placed on one of the empty tables left over from the party two days ago. I didn't see Applejack anywhere, but the front door was slightly ajar, so I headed outside.

Sure enough, she was sitting in the shade nearby, disconsolately fiddling with the tag end of chain still attached to the manacle around her hind leg. I paced over to her, enjoying the soft natural sounds of the parkland around us. "You're up early."

"Huh?" She glanced up at me. "Hey there. We always work long hours at Sweet Apple Acres. It just wouldn't seem raht not to get up with the sunrise. I've got nothin' in particular to do here, but ah couldn't see headin' home just yet. An' ah didn't want to rattle around inside, an' wake everypony up. We stayed up pretty late."

I sat down next to her. "I'm sure you were all glad to be back together."

"Oh, yeah." Her restless hooves stilled for a moment, and she looked up at me very seriously. "Thank you for whut you did, Sir Harry. I don't know how much longer we would have lasted if you hadn't come along."

I shrugged, a little uncomfortable. "You gals are pretty self-sufficient under most circumstances, it seems to me. But things get a lot tougher when the other side cheats."

"You said it. Ah cain't stand cheaters."

We sat in silence for a little while, enjoying the cool, quiet morning. And then I went and spoiled it.

"Can you tell me about what you saw, while you were being held prisoner?" I asked quietly. Her eyes shot up to my face with nervous speed. "It could be a big help to figuring out what's going on with the guy behind the cat things."

She sighed and looked away again, focusing on the green, rolling land before us. "You're raht." She was silent for a long time after that, but I didn't push. "When they first flew off with us, they headed straight fer that tower where you found us. Dragged the three of us insahd an' tossed us on the floor. Sat on us, one or two on each. I could hardly breathe, hardly see Fluttershy or Rainbow. This thing came inta the room. Its shadow was huge and wavery, and it hardly used its fore-legs at all." She shuddered, lost in memory. "It talked ta the critters that caught us, in this weird, yowlin' tongue. They talked back. Givin' a report, ah reckon. Ah couldn't understand a word o' what they was sayin', but ah could tell when they got ta the part about me hitchin' a rahd. The big guy got mighty riled up about that. Went on fer a while. Even said a little ah could understand, about useless earth ponies, and taking vengeance fer mah 'trespass.' Funny choice o' terms, ah thought. He left an' came back with these chains." She shook her hoof in clanking counterpoint. "Made the cats git off'a me and hooked me up ta the wall, so's ah could watch what he did to the other gals an 'Savor mah doom,' so he said."

"What else can you tell me about him?" I asked.

"He was huge, Harry. Taller'n any o' those cat things. Bulky too. With a big long snout full o' curvy sharp teeth. Little mean lookin' eyes that was set real close together. Thick, short neck, an' broad shoulders. His front half was jes' way bigger than his back half, ya know? Out o' whack. An' his head was covered in scales. Brownish grey an' smooth, like a snake's, but his body was all furry. Rough an messy." She chuckled to herself. "Rarity woulda' had a hissy fit over his personal hygiene." She shook her head. "Whut else? His feet. They had toes lahk a dog or a cat, but longer, an' huge claws on the ends of 'em. An' he didn't wear no clothes, but he had somethin' strapped to his back on a belt sorta thing. It was long an' straight, an' skinny, with kinda spahks all over it, but ah never got a very good look.

"After he chained me down, he did some kinda ceremony over Rainbow and Fluttershy. He held up the skinny thing an flailed it around, recitin' some kind o' poetry ah couldn't understand. An' they—" She paused, glancing up at me, then hurried on. "They changed. Inta those cat critters, like they was when you found us. When he was done with that, he gloated at me some more, about letting 'em eat me when they got hungry 'nough, then set tha other cats to guard us and jest left us there, alone." She shuddered once and looked away again. "At first it was no big deal. T'weren't fun bein' locked up lahk that, but not unbearable neither. An' Fluttershy an' Rainbow Dash mostly just lazed around in the sunbeams an' slept at first. But after the first day an' naht had gone by, they started gettin' restless. They started lookin' at me more. An' not in a good way."

She was silent for another long moment, until I started to think that she was done talking. "Ah didn't want ta believe it then," she said softly. "Ah don't want to even now, when it's all over. But ah'm afraid he might'a been raht, in the end. They might'a eaten me themselves, eventually." She met my eyes, her expression lost. "How could anythin' do that? Change 'em so much, ah mean? Even when Discord flip-flopped us all around, he was turnin' ourselves on our heads, not cuttin' from whole cloth lahk that."

I sighed and looked away. I didn't have an answer for her.

"_Good morning, everypony!"_ Pinkie Pie crowed from right behind us.

I flinched, and had to thank my lucky stars (or something) that I didn't have a hangover, or that would have been _incredibly_ painful. "Good morning, Pinkie," Applejack and I said, in almost the exact same put-upon tone.

Pinkie pranced around to face us. "What are you two being gloomy Guses about? It's a beautiful day and everypony's rescued, and we should be happy!"

I opened my mouth but Applejack beat me to it. "You're raht, sugar cube. We _should_ be happy." Which wasn't exactly what I would have said, but I let it lie.

"We should be moving. There's still lots to do," I added instead.

"Like what, Harry berry?"

"Like getting the manacle off your friend's leg, and doing some more research to get to the bottom of Scalyface's attacks." My stomach interrupted me with a huge, hollow growl. "And maybe getting some breakfast," I concluded. "There's a blacksmith somewhere in town who can take care of the ugly jewelry, right?"

"There is," Twilight said from the doorway, "But I think I can handle that. I'm sorry Applejack, I should have thought of it sooner."

"That's okay, sugar cube, we've all had a lot on our mahnds lately."

I raised an eyebrow and watched curiously as Twilight took position next to Applejack and concentrated, calling up the cool, purple-white aura around her horn once again. I've always been pretty leery about performing any sort of magic strong enough to damage steel close enough to someone's flesh to do any good in removing restraints, so I was very interested to see how the little unicorn would handle it.

The manacle and chain took on a matching purplish glow over the next few seconds. Then, quick as blinking—with an odd, sparkly little burst of sound—the steel chain and cuff transformed themselves into a daisy chain. Still concentrating fiercely, Twilight said, "Okay, get it off, quick." Applejack leaned down and pulled the ring of vegetation off her hoof while I sat there with my jaw hanging open again.

"Got it." Applejack said, once the flowers lay scattered on the grass. With a relieved gasp, Twilight dropped the working, the aura disappeared from around horn and greenery and—with an audible pop—the manacle was back, in shattered pieces.

"Phew," Twilight said, plopping down on the grass next to her friend. "That's still really tough. Good thing I didn't need to hold it any longer."

"Aw, Twi, you're too modest." Applejack retorted. "I've never met another unicorn pony as talented at magic as you."

"No kidding," I muttered, mostly to myself. What next, birds flying out of her ass?

"Good morning, everypony!" caroled a new voice, sharp-edged and spring-wound, from right over our heads. I looked up to see the rainbow-maned pegasus, up and around at last, standing on the second floor balcony, peering down over the railing at us.

The gathered ponies chorused a good morning back to Rainbow Dash. I just nodded politely, since we hadn't been officially introduced. The frisky blue pony spread her wings and leapt into the air, fluttering down to join us with all the grace and control of a hummingbird, despite a wingspan that shouldn't have been able to hold up a pigeon. "Who's this guy?" she demanded, immediately giving me the stink eye. "I don't like his looks."

I narrowed my eyes and stood up, offering her another polite nod without taking my eyes off her. The memory of a giant cat with her coloring doing its best to bite my head off was still just a little too fresh for comfort. "Harry—hmph—Flanks, at your service, miss. I'm here to help Twilight deal with the critter in the woods."

"He's the one who stopped you being all toothy MacMeany mean-pants, Dashy! You should be thanking him!" Pinkie Pie piped up.

"Oh yeah?" Rainbow Dash said, still suspicious. "Then why do I remember him throwing me through a wall?"

"Uh–" This could be awkward.

"Oh. Yeah. That happened too," Pinkie said, before I could get anything more out. "A couple times." Yeah. Definitely awkward.

"Well, to be fair, you weren't exactly in your right mind at the time," I hedged. "And no permanent harm done, so that's the important thing, right?" I backed up a couple of steps, just in case it wasn't.

"Rainbow Dash, you should be _ashamed_ of yourself!" Rarity's round, musical tones rang out from the doorway behind me. "_Sir_ Harry saved you—saved _all_ of us—from certain, _horrible_ doom! The least you could do in return is show a little courtesy!"

"Oh. Uh. Really?" The pegasus looked a little taken aback at that.

"Well, I for one, thank you from the bottom of my heart, Sir Harry," came another new voice; light, feminine, soft, and gentle almost to the point of inaudibility. It originated with the delicate yellow pegasus currently fluttering down from the balcony as lightly as a butterfly, her long, elegant pink mane and tail rippling in the light breeze. "I just don't want to think about what might have happened if you hadn't been able to change us back." One huge green eye peered timidly up at me from under the long sweep of her forelock, making me want to offer her a teddy bear and a big hug.

"Fluttershy, I presume," I said instead, and made my best attempt at a sweeping bow. Wonder of wonders, I didn't fall flat on my face, although I did have to stand up in a bit of a hurry to avoid it. "I was honored to be of assistance." I glanced over at the more belligerent rescuee. "And I offer my deepest apologies for any, uh, rough-housing that may have been necessary in the process. I hope you'll forgive me, Rainbow Dash."

"Well–I s'pose. Thanks, mister."

"You're welcome."

Twilight stepped smoothly into the awkward silence that followed. "I don't know about anypony else, but I'm famished!" she proclaimed. "Let's go into town and get some breakfast."

"I'm up for that!" Spike called out from just inside the tree-library. "Way less work for me, and no dishes to wash!"

"Yes, Spike. That's the _only_ reason I suggested it," Twilight said, with near-me levels of sarcasm. She turned to me in an aside, licking her lips. "It doesn't have _anything_ to do with the fact that Chef Honey makes the best oat and barley pancakes this side of Canterlot."

"Sounds like a plan," I confirmed, and turned uncertainly. "Which way?"

With an enthusiastic exclamation, Rainbow Dash zipped back into the air and led us off toward what was probably the center of town, and the market areas I'd passed through with Twilight when we arrived two days ago.

The rest of us followed behind at a comfortable walking pace—even the other pegasus, who simply hovered along a few inches above the ground, within easy conversational range of Rarity and the others. I squinted at her suspiciously. Her wings weren't flapping anywhere near often enough to keep her aloft. It was more as though she just floated where she chose in the air and flapped her wings to move herself forward. Or maybe the flight was entirely magical and the flapping was just for show. _Never mind, Harry, it's not important._

This time, as we proceeded through the town, I was treated to a running commentary-slash-tour, of the surrounding buildings and ponies, mainly thanks to Pinkie Pie, who bounded along happily beside me, each bounce bringing her eyes briefly more or less even with my own. "And that's Sugar Cube Corner where I work for Mr. and Mrs. Cake!" she said enthusiastically, pointing out the huge gingerbread monstrosity I'd noticed when I first arrived. "And—"

"_And_ here we are!" Twilight burst in. She guided us to a large outdoor table surrounded by discreet little piles of straw, apparently for sitting on, and introduced us to the waiter, a snooty pony with a silver serving dish for an identifying mark. I let the little ponies' casual talk wash over me mostly unnoticed as we ordered, and waited for, and ate our remarkably tasty breakfast. The buckwheat pancakes were great, and so was the leek and spinach omelet, but it would have gone down way better with a side of bacon.

Amazingly, even I wasn't tactless enough to mention the idea of eating pigs and cows to a bunch of horses. Will miracles never cease?

Once we were done, we headed back to the library, and the talk turned more serious. All of the girls' conversation struck me as being reasonably sensible—aside from Pinkie's, of course—but they didn't come up with anything new.

"Well, at least things can't get any worse, right?" Pinkie Pie enthused from her pronking point between me and Twilight.

The two of us turned and glared at her in pretty much one motion. Spike, from his perch on Twilight's back, squawked, "Aw, jeez Pinkie! You should know never to say that! Now things are gonna get—"

And suddenly all of us were drenched in rain. Cold rain. Icy cold, as though it had come from the highest early spring clouds.

"Ditzy Doo!" Rainbow Dash shrieked from somewhere above us. "What are you _doing?_"

I shaded my eyes with a hoof and squinted up into the downpour just in time for it to stop, as abruptly as it had begun. Directly above us was a single, triangular cartoon cloud, with a lavender-maned yellow pegasus peering nervously over the edge of it, looking for all the world as though she were sitting on the thing.

"Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't see you there!" she called down to us, in a breathy voice.

"Well what are you doing squeezing clouds right over Ponyville anyway?" Rainbow Dash scolded. "It's not supposed to rain around here for two more days!"

"Oh. I. Uh—I think my mother's calling me!" the breathy pony exclaimed, and zipped off over the town, in a ruler-straight line directly away from the angry pegasus. Hmph. So I wasn't alone in finding the rainbow one just a little bit unnerving.

"What the hell was that?" I asked the general area.

"Oh, never mind Ditzy Doo," Rainbow Dash said dismissively. "If there's anything going wrong with the weather within ten miles of Cloudsdale, she'll be involved in it somehow. Why last Winter Wrap Up, she went _north_ looking for the southern birds!"

"An' tha year buhfore _that_, she went west," Applejack added, looking miffed and sodden. "Durn feather-brain's got less sense than one o' Fluttershy's rabbit friends. Meanin' no offense ta yer bunnies, Fluttershy," she hurried to add.

"None taken," Fluttershy said, barely audible. She was entirely dry, having apparently dodged out of the way of the sudden, isolated downpour. The rest of the girls looked decidedly the worse for wear; Rarity's polished locks and Pinkie's frizzy 'do were both plastered flatter than Twilight's normally straight mane. Applejack grabbed her hat with one fore-hoof and slapped it against her side a couple of times, sending pale sprays of water flying off in parallel arcs. I shook my head hard, lightly sprinkling the already drenched ponies on both sides of me, and probably leaving my short, perpetually messy hair looking about the same as usual.

"Hang on, ladies, let me do something for that!" Rainbow Dash enthused, rearing up in the air just in front of us, wings beating energetically in a direction completely useless to the aims of providing either lift or propulsion. Yeah. Definitely just for show.

"Hold it!" Twilight said, raising one imperious hoof. "I still remember the last time you tried to 'help' me with something like this, Dash—"

"As do I!" Rarity interjected.

"—and I'm not interested in a repeat. Besides, I made it a point to learn a spell for just this sort of situation."

"For just such an occasion?" I asked.

"You'd be surprised how often this sort of thing comes up," Twilight confided.

"Let me guess—every time someone says, 'things can't get any worse'?"

She eyed me for a moment. "Something like that." Her eyes narrowed, her horn glowed gently, and, with a sudden shimmery sound, all of us were not only dry but re-coiffed, as though nothing had happened.

"Aw," Rainbow Dash sulked, hovering upside down almost nose to nose with the purple unicorn, "I kinda liked your blow-dried look!"

"_You_ would," Rarity said, rolling her eyes.

Twilight shook her head gently and got us moving toward the treehouse library again. Dash flipped over in midair and casually gave the wrung-out cloud a double-hoofed back kick. It dissipated in a brief puff of displaced air.

I stared blankly at the now-empty patch of sky. _I am _so_ far from home right now…_

Something was stirring in the back of my head, but it was still too fragile—or too shy—to be dragged out into the light yet. I shook my head again and trotted to catch up with the girls. "So what's this Winter Wrap Up thing?" I asked. "You've mentioned it a couple of times now."

They told me.

They were pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing, so the explanations—and the arguments they spawned—took the rest of the walk back and then some. We ended up sprawled around Twilight's living room again before they wound down.

"So let me get this straight. On the day that winter is scheduled to end, everybody gets together and manually removes all signs of the season, to officially replace it with spring."

"Not just the signs, Sir Harry, the whole thing!" Pinkie corrected unhelpfully.

"What would happen if you didn't do all that?"

They were all silent for a moment, staring at me blankly. Rather as though I'd asked someone back home what would happen if the earth stopped orbiting the sun.

"Ah reckon we'd all starve ta death purty durn quick in that case. Ya cain't grow things while there's snow on the ground."

I sputtered for a long moment, trying to find words to explain that that wasn't how it _worked_. "You _schedule snowfall_?"

"And rain!" Rainbow Dash said. "And sunny or cloudy days to manage the temperature! I'm a team leader on the weather patrol, 'cause of my awesome skills!"

I buried my head under my hooves, nose pressed into the dry wood of the floor. "This just doesn't make any sense," I muttered. "My head hurts."

"I have a—" Twilight began solicitously. I imagine she was about to tell me she had a spell for headaches. Why not? But she was interrupted by a weird belching sound. I looked up to see Spike exhaling a foot-long burst of bright green flame, within which a parchment scroll materialized, wrapped tightly closed with a red ribbon, and some sort of official-looking seal. As soon as it was fully formed, it suddenly noticed gravity, and plopped to the floor. "Oh," Twilight interrupted herself. "What's the news from Princess Celestia, Spike?"

The cute little dragon popped the seal and unrolled the scroll with a brisk motion. He scanned its contents for a long moment, his simply-illustrated face lengthening in worry as he did. He let the scroll fall closed in limp hands and looked up to meet Twilight's eyes. "There've been more attacks. Three early this morning or late last night, all along the northern border of the Everfree. Seven more ponies are dead and an even dozen missing."

"Yeah," I said into the somber silence. "First rule of heroing, kids. Things can _always_ get worse."


	10. Chapter 10

**New Plans**

Within the hour, we were packed up and heading north again—all eight of us. Twilight had argued strenuously when Spike first insisted on coming, but he was a lot more stubborn about it this time, and finally won her over when he pointed out that she needed to be able to keep in touch with the Princess during the crisis. Apparently his magical digestive troubles were their primary means of communication.

We tromped through the outskirts of Ponyville and along the northbound path in relative silence, even Pinkie Pie's usual exuberance squashed for the moment. I let my feet follow the rest of the herd on automatic pilot while my brain strained itself sorting and re-sorting the ill-fitting puzzle pieces of this weird, terrifying, and weirdly terrifying situation, seeking the corner or edge that would let things start falling into place.

My mood darkened as we closed in on the site of the two witness ponies' deaths. I couldn't help but dwell on how entirely wrong it felt to see such innocent, _peaceful_ creatures violated by bloody murder. That thought led me to the singed and blackened cat-corpses deeper in the woods. Dear God, but I didn't belong here.

But if _I_ didn't, neither did the creature responsible for all this. I clamped down on the horror and sick fear that tried to rise up in my gut, swearing to myself that I'd get rid of him and then get myself gone too, corrupting influence and all.

Inevitably, we arrived at the site of the first attack on Twilight and her friends sooner than I expected. We trotted across the little bridge and up the hill, and the bright light of the beautiful day lit the fading blood smears and scattered, unidentifiable bits that were all that remained of the incident with harsh clarity.

I paused, remembering for a moment the same scene, moonlit and eerie, as it had been two nights ago: The raccoons snatching bits of flesh to snack on, and the scandalized responses of the ponies to such a natural, if distasteful, phenomenon.

But how natural was it, around here?

"Hey, Rainbow Dash," I called.

"Yeah, Harry?"

"Who arranges the weather over the forest?"

"Which part?"

"The really deep stuff. The Everfree."

She grunted uncomfortably. "Well. Nobody. That's what's so creepy about the place. The clouds move all on their own out there. It's really hard to mess with them even a little, and they go right back to what they were doing as soon as you stop trying."

"Yeah, that place is just _plain_ wrong," Applejack piped in. "The plants an' animals do ever'thing for themselves, an' up until just recently a pony couldn't hardly set foot in there an' stand any chance of comin' out alahv."

I gave her a sharp look. "Just _how_ recently?"

"Ah'm not sure. Maybe a year or so?"

"Maybe since you confronted Nightmare Moon?"

They were all silent for a moment, considering that. "Yes, that sounds about right," Fluttershy finally supplied.

"Yeah, that fits," I said. "I think I know what we need to do."

ooOoo

We didn't have to backtrack all that much to find the trail into the Everfree Forest that would lead us to the ancient castle ruins. In fact, a little close questioning confirmed my suspicion that the former ruling seat where Twilight and her friends had confronted the corrupted Luna was well north of Ponyville. I suppose if we'd known our way better we could have cut straight across, but no-one wanted to risk getting turned around in the hostile environment.

We arrived just before high noon, crossing a rickety rope bridge and following a narrow, winding rock path to the crumbling remains of yet another fairytale confection.

The bare bones of the ancient castle thrust up thin fingers of stone—the remains of half a dozen slender spires—and half-tumbled walls traced the arching outlines of numerous grand halls and elegant corridors, winding their way up the slopes of a low, weathered hill.

We made our way into the first of those tattered chambers. The fragile sections of wall were pierced by the bare metal skeletons of elegantly arched windows, their stained glass long fallen. Here and there ivy-choked columns interrupted the dirt- and weed-scattered flagstone floors, and in a central spot stood a larger stone statue on a thick pedestal—maybe the remains of a fancy fountain. As I looked around at the place I had the vague, uneasy sense of meeting an old acquaintance's ghost. I recognized the style of architecture, and even the remains of the decor. This was most assuredly a place laid out by the same mind that imagined the grand palace where Twilight and I had first arrived, at the beginning of this crazy adventure.

"Yeah, this is the right place," I muttered. I stretched my neck down to examine the base of the big pedestal. Easier than squatting. "This is where you said you first found the Elements, right?"

"Yes, that's right," Twilight said. "Why are we here again, Sir Harry?"

"It's all about the law of the jungle, kid. And ancient history."

"Whut ancient history exactly?" Applejack asked.

"Exactly." I glanced up at seven sets of inquiring, over-large eyes and sighed. How was I going to explain this to their satisfaction without doing exactly what Celestia had asked me to avoid? Most of those little ponies had saved my life at least once in the last couple of days. I couldn't just brush them off. And I wasn't going to lie. Even if I wanted to, I'm pretty crappy at it. "I'm not a hundred percent sure. If we had the time, I might just go back to Twilight's library and ask for a crash course, but you may not have the information in your books," for reasons I wasn't about to go into here and now. "And we don't have the time, if we're going to stop this son of a bitch from hurting any more of your people. So I'm going to need to find out the hard way."

They all settled down on their haunches, unconsciously falling into a half-circle before me like school kids settling in for a lecture. God I felt old all of a sudden. "You see," I said, continuing to examine the details of the sculpture. "I was wrong before, when I said our opponent wasn't from around here. Well, not totally wrong, but partly at least. My best guess is, he's not from a far off _place_. He's from a far off _time_. Back before Celestia and her sister took over this world—or this part of it, anyway—from Discord, things were very different—"

"Yeah, they got chocolate rain!" Pinkie Pie burst in.

I gave her a narrow-eyed stare as Twilight snapped, "Along with a lot of less pleasant things, Pinkie! I wish you'd stop going on about the rain."

"I know," she said, ducking her head, "But chocolate—"

"Pink-_ie!_" they all shouted in unison. Good trick.

"They may have gotten the occasional confectionary thunderstorm, but I'm betting that they also had to put up with Darwin." They looked blank. I can't really say I was surprised. "Survival of the fittest? Predators and prey?" Still nothing. I sighed. No point going on about "nature red in tooth and claw." "I don't think Discord was the only personified force that your princesses defeated way back when. But this one never got turned to stone. He was banished. I don't know where at first, but most recently here, the Everfree Forest. And your intrusion last year changed that. Messed up the border somehow. Weakened his hold on this last bastion of wilderness."

"Wait," Twilight said. "If we _weakened_ this creature you're talking about, why is he suddenly doing so much more damage?"

I gave her a nod. "I'm pretty sure it's because he got help. And I have a hunch where from." I scowled down at the useless statue, then around at the dozen or so empty window frames. "You mentioned that Celestia had stained glass windows made up to commemorate your victories?"

"Yep!" Rainbow Dash supplied. "They're in the grand hall at Canterlot and they're _awesome!_"

I stood, stretched, and walked over to one of the nearest neatly arched holes in the wall. "I hope she did the same thing here. Could you girls help me look for labels on these?"

"Labels?"

"Plaques, inscriptions. Any kind of markings that might tell us what the particular picture was supposed to represent. It's going to be tough enough reconstructing _one_ of these things. I'd like to get the right one the first time."

They spread out willingly enough, digging through the moss and creepers around the base of each window until we'd cleared and examined all of them. There were labels of a sort, but they were in an ancient dialect that even Twilight had trouble making out. And on top of it, the titles seemed to have been unnecessarily cryptic even for their time. After some consultation, we decided that "The Harrowing of the Lesser Terrors" was the most likely to have what I needed.

I sorted through the debris at the base of that window till I found a shard of dusty brown glass about the size of a finger—the biggest one in the vicinity—and settled down in a quickly sketched circle to work out my reconstruction.

It was more complicated than many pieces of thaumaturgy I've done, but not the toughest by a long shot. I gathered the power, settled my intentions deep in the shard of glass I held, focused fiercely on the results I needed, and murmured a few words of faux Latin to lock in the spell, then broke the circle and watched the glass fly off the end of my hoof, up into its proper position in the window frame, immediately followed by shards from the floor beneath it. Just a few popped up at first, then more and more as I kept my will focused on the magic, until I sat in the eye of a veritable storm of multicolored glass.

Each little pane and chunk fitted itself in with its neighbors, slowly building out from the first piece's position near the bottom, aggregating into a shaky plane; a dusty shadow of its former glory. There were gaps and spaces here and there, where pieces of glass had been reduced to powder or fallen too far away from the window to be reached by my spell, but by the time the storm settled the image was reconstructed well enough to be understood.

The panel showed half a dozen ponies of various colors running frantically in all directions from an equal number of mismatched villains. The attackers were a hodgepodge of appearances; monsters out of both myth and prehistory. A dragon here, a saber-toothed tiger there.

"What do you say, Applejack? Any of them look familiar?"

"Sure 'nough, Sir Harry! That one raight there." And the orange pony pointed out one of the attacking creatures, a yellowish, hunchbacked thing with a grey face whose features combined those of wolf and snake into a flat, vicious mask.

"Great!" I said, "Twilight, grab a chunk of that one, would you?" A pale purple light surrounded one large piece of yellow glass and tugged it down to hover in front of the little lavender unicorn. With a sigh I let go of the spell, and the rest of the glass crashed back to the ground in a glittering wave. "Perfect, thanks." I accepted the sample shard from her and headed out of the hall into the overgrown courtyard beyond.

"So what's your next trick gonna be, Harry?" Pinkie prompted.

"Next we get the bastard's attention."

With another larger circle sketched out in the courtyard for a summoning, I set the shard of glass on the ground in the center and looked around. "I'll need five candles," I said. "And a small donation from you, if you're willing, Fluttershy."

"What do you need, Sir Harry?" the timid pegasus asked.

"Just a few drops of your blood, please." She opened her mouth with a scandalized shudder and I hurried on. "It won't do you any real harm. I just need—" It wouldn't do to explain that she was the closest thing I was going to get on short notice to a sacrificial prey animal. "—Another connection to the creature."

"Oh. Well, I suppose if you really need it." She paced up next to me and held out one hoof. I used the sharp edge of the shard of glass to graze the side of her leg, catching a tiny blob of scarlet on the side of it.

"Thank you."

While I was busy with that, Twilight pulled the same candles she'd used for our transportation spell out of her saddlebags, and helped me place them around the circle at the points of an imagined star.

"Okay, what now?" she asked.

"Now, I'm going to need some privacy," I said, settling myself at the edge of the circle, and lighting the candles with a brief thought.

"Why's that, Harry?" Pinkie Pie asked.

"Because a summoning like this takes a lot of concentration, and someone making a noise or asking a stupid question while I'm in the middle of it could have disastrous consequences." I gave her a glare to go along with the sharp words, but she didn't seem the slightest bit fazed by it.

"Okey dokey! Ooh, what's that up there?" Her head snapped around to stare at the tallest tower of the old castle still standing, and she bounced in place for a moment. "Let's go take a look!"

"Yeah, sure, whatever. Just be ready to come back when I call you, okay?" I said distractedly. My mind was already focusing on how to draw the creature here so he could answer for his crimes.

Under normal circumstances, back home, I'd never even consider trying to summon a corporeal creature from one place to another. I'm not sure if it can be done at _all_, but I know if it could it would take an insane amount of power. Summoning spiritual entities is entirely different—worlds easier—and still exceptionally dangerous. But Twilight's admission that she could teleport herself, combined with all the other impossible stuff I'd seen her and her friends do, had convinced me that it should be feasible here.

I barely heard the ponies filing out of the courtyard, so intent was I on preparing myself for the spell. When I felt ready, I reached out one hoof and touched the edge of the circle I'd carved into the thick layer of dirt that lay across the old flagstones, a gentle effort of will closing it, creating the platform to which I would summon the creature.

Normally, when summoning a creature of the Nevernever, you need to know its true name, or failing that at least a name or rhyme or nickname by which it's generally known. I knew little more about this thing than a vague description of its appearance, but the evidence of its actions gave me some ideas of how to address it. That was just going to have to be enough.

"Hunter of the Everfree," I began, slipping will into my voice so that it rang sharply off the walls and trees around me. "Champion of predators and devourer of the weak. Hunter, hear me!"

Thunder rumbled somewhere over the deep forest and a shiver ran down my spine, all the way to the end of my tail. An intangible sense of pressure on the back of my neck told me that _something_ was listening. Whether it was the creature I was seeking or not remained to be seen. "I am Harry Dresden, Knight of the Winter Court, and I call you out! The time has come to cease hiding behind the backs of your victims. If you be a true creature of the hunt and the kill, then let your face be known. Show yourself, coward! Come forth and face me!" My voice rose with every sentence, the disgust and rage I felt at the creature's tactics boiling forth into the air, until by the end of that tirade it rang back to me from the surrounding walls, loud enough to make my eardrums ache and rattle small stones loose from the ruins.

A horrible sound filled the air, hard on the heels of my call; something like a wildcat's scream crossed with the roar of an angry bear, it shot through my nervous system like fear made solid, skewering me for an instant on a bolt of sheer instinctive terror. "Coward, am I?" an impossibly deep, growling voice boomed out—from behind and somewhere above me. I whipped around, looking for the source of it, but saw nothing in the moonlit, tree-shadowed darkness all around.

Another bolt of lightning crashed to the ground just beyond the ruined castle, flaring shocking white in my vision and leaving me utterly blind for a long, heart-stopping moment. By the time I managed to blink away the blackened afterimage there was another light rising before me, in the windows of the tallest tower, and a shadow—huge and hunchbacked—loomed within. "Oh shit." That was where the girls had gone to wait, wasn't it?

My teeth clenched hard enough to make my jaw ache as I stared helplessly up at the half-dozen flights of stairs between myself and the threat. There was no way I was getting up there before the hunter did something horrible to Twilight and her friends. I couldn't let that happen again. It was the whole point of my being here. I glared at the eerie blood-red light shining out of those deep-set windows and made a foolish decision. I've never tried casting a spell to teleport myself from one point to another, but I've made potions with similar effects, and last year—while I was spending a few days dead for tax purposes—I learned how ghosts pull a very similar stunt. Screw it. If Twilight could do it, so would I.

I focused all my attention on that window sill and turned my gathered will—no longer needed for the botched summoning attempt—toward imagining myself not _here_ but _there_. My horn lit with a pure white glow that washed the whole courtyard around me, and I _moved_, with a rushing, twisting-inward sensation as though I had briefly turned into a pony-sized tornado and swallowed myself. Then with a snap, I stood on the thick sill of the window, looking down the length of a huge stone hall. My knees wobbled in reaction to the sudden leap, and for a moment it was all I could do to stay upright. Well, horizontal. You know what I mean.

The room that spread out at my feet was just plain tremendous. Its ceiling arched thirty feet or more above my head—more complete than in any other part of the ancient castle—and the window-studded walls stretched three times that long. At the far end was a small dais, bathed in moonlight from a wide bay window, on which stood the creature Applejack had described to me.

He was a huge, hunch-shouldered monster, as disproportionately muscular as the biggest ghoul I'd ever seen, and nearly as grotesque. His face was scaly and grey, flat and vicious looking, with oversized, almost Smilodon-like teeth that overhung his lips the way a crocodile's do. The rest of his body was covered in yellowish brown fur that stuck up all over in clumps and whirls—like those guinea pigs with the spiky hairdos, only uglier. It gave me a brief, unpleasant reminder of the skinwalker I encountered a couple of years back. He stood on two legs, but his arms hung down almost to the floor, and he held himself as though he might be more comfortable knuckle-walking like an ape. His fingers and toes were decorated with long, thick claws, more like a dog's than a cat's. And as if that weren't enough weaponry for a whole platoon of predators, he wore a leather baldric slung over one shoulder from which hung a dark sword, its hilt and cross-guard studded with spikes like thick metal thorns. It looked familiar.

Between us more than a dozen multicolored flap-cats stood surrounding the six ponies, heads lowered, teeth bared.

I fixed my gaze on Scalyface and cleared my throat. "Hey ugly."

His piggish red eyes snapped up to mine.

"So this is how you prove your mettle? Go after the weakest link again?"

That terrifying growling sound filled the air of the big room, vibrating against every inch of my skin like feedback from blown speakers at a rock concert. (Yes, I know what that sounds like. Trust me.) "Who are you, who dares speak so to me?" the hideous thing growled, with a voice like rocks in a dryer.

I shook my head and stepped carefully down from the window sill. "You know, I hate having to repeat myself. So let's just say, I am your doom."

Scalyface's lip curled up at that—he had plenty of lip to do it with—and he growled something to the flap cats in a language I didn't understand. All of them tensed, their heads lowering as they shifted closer around the six ponies in the middle of the room. "Say rather that I am yours, tasty tidbit. It is time and past time for the true order of nature to be restored."

"Yeah, I thought that's what this was about," I said, walking a little closer, and not coincidentally finding an angle that left neither cats nor ponies blocking the straight path between us. "It must have rubbed you raw all this time, a bunch of herbivores running the place. And doing it so well."

"They do _not!_" Scalyface roared. "The order of these vermin is a mere sham, a brief ugly jest soon forgotten."

"Ri-ght. One that's been going strong for a couple of _thousand_ years? You're living in a dream world, gorgeous, and I'm here with your wake-up call. Now call off your back-up band and let's settle this one on one."

"And why precisely would I give up my advantage, stupid pony?"

"Applejack, _now!_" Twilight's sudden shout startled me at least as much as it did the hunter. I jerked my gaze away to see the orange pony rearing up to dump her stuffed saddlebags out onto the stone floor, creating a veritable landslide of neatly coiled rope. Twilight and Rarity nodded once to each other and flares of magic from both of their horns swept up the bundles, flicking them up above the ponies' heads and quickly spreading them out between the six friends and their attackers.

That might have been useful by itself as a barrier between the two groups, but the girls weren't done. Before I'd finished taking a surprised breath, the tentacles of rope flung themselves out at the cats, multiple loops winding around each cat and tightening with surprising strength. The ropes wound and bit, hog-tying the critters one after the next until not a single one was left standing.

I snickered and called out over the chorus of outraged felines, "What advantage would that be, exactly?" I stepped forward a little more and my voice hardened. "I'm giving you one chance here, Chuckles. Just because I'm not _entirely_ convinced that wiping you off the face of the planet is the best course of action. Give back what you've taken, and give me your oath never to intrude on the ponies' territory again, and I'll let you live. Refuse and I'll be having a nice rare Scalyface steak for dinner tonight."

Princess Celestia's voice rang out from the top of the steps behind me, clear as crystal, and coldly furious. "And what possible purpose could be served by this creature's continued existence, Sir Knight? I called you here to _eliminate_ this threat to my ponies, not to bargain with it."

A cold shiver ran down the unnatural length of my spine as I turned to see my client standing just inside the room—as tall and regal as before, with her elegant horn and flowing, star-flecked mane. Spike, the tiny dragon, stood nervously in her shadow. He blinked and acknowledged my glance with a little wave. Despite the sudden butterflies in my stomach, I gave him an approving nod. Spike must have dashed off another letter while the rest of us were arguing. Smart kid. Ticklish as it might be to explain the situation to her, I realized that it would be absolutely necessary to have the princess here if anything was to be truly settled. Of course, the first thing I'd need to do was settle _her_. Somehow.

"I said I would do my best for you, Princess, and I intend to. But what's actually best in this situation remains to be seen."

"Nay. It does not, mortal man." Her cold stare pinned me in place, and I felt again the slow-turning, ageless power of the pony-shaped creature before me. "This vile beast and his red hunger lurked the fringes of the world when Discord ruled it. And when my sister and I cast the Lord of Misrule down in defeat, he and others like him came creeping out of the shadows, spilling blood and sowing ruthless chaos of their own stripe everywhere they touched." She snorted and stamped a hoof, and it rang silver-bright in the otherwise silent hall. "We put a stop to it. We carved out our glorious Equestria, barricaded it away from the endless, mindless horrors of predator and prey. We left much of the world to them, unwilling to reach beyond our means to grasp. But we were wrong to stop there. This savage beast's late incursions prove it. He and all like him must be eradicated. Equestria's enlightenment shall replace their vicious cycles, to the betterment of all."

"_NO!_" shouted the Hunter. "It is _you_ who have crossed all boundaries! _You_ broke the ancient bargain when you sent these sweet-faced vermin into our home, _our_ territory." One huge, muscle -distorted arm reached back over his shoulder and grasped the hilt of the black metal sword, dragging it out to point clumsily at the princess. "We _will_ be avenged!"

"Where do you think you stand, foolish carnivore? Before Luna's fall, all these woods were ours, and many more lands besides. Now that my sister is returned to me, is it not meet that the lands that she helped me claim be returned to us?"

"These lands are _mine_ and I will not yield them!" The Hunter raised the thorny sword above his head and began to chant something in yet another foreign tongue, but this one sounded vaguely familiar to me. I felt like I'd heard it at least once before—somewhere dark and scary.

Power began to gather, tightening the air around the sword and the creature holding it; wild, bloodthirsty power, capricious and violent.

"Oh no you don't!" I growled, and charged him. As I did, I drew in my own magic, preparing a counterstrike. The energy tingled up from my hooves on each impact with the ground, through the long bones of my legs, arced across each individual vertebra, sizzled through my skull and bloomed into light all down the length of my horn.

I guess Scalyface had kind of forgotten about me. That or he just wasn't expecting such an aggressive move from a pony. He lowered the blade in my direction, his eyes widening, tripping over his tongue in his hurry to finish the spell's invocation.

He nearly got it off.

Lunging up onto the edge of the dais, I flicked my chin up and to the side, parrying the sword blade aside with the length of my horn, ready to follow it up with a thrust at the middle of his chest. It worked a lot better this time than my last attempt at jousting had, maybe because my maneuver more closely resembled a fencing move than a knight's charge. But as the two weapons came into contact, the nearly finished framework of Scalyface's spell hit me—literally—in the face.

A rush of magic dropped onto my shoulders and raked at my physical form, digging spectral fingers into my flesh as it tried to fulfill its purpose and reshape me into one of the Hunter's brutish minions. My heart thundered. I'd hoped to beat him to the punch, but I'd been just a touch too slow. The power unleashed was far greater than mine, far greater than anything this loser was capable of calling on his own, I was sure of it. Pure willpower could do nothing to protect me from the attack, and if I tried to disassemble this spell with a simple counter, I'd probably just splatter myself all over the walls with the backlash.

Fortunately, I had a backup plan.

"_Rectus!_" I snarled, unleashing my own power against that crashing tide of near-elemental magic. I had no hope of dismantling it entirely, but since I knew what he was trying to do, I had the opportunity to twist it, and that's exactly what I did.

After all, human beings are predators too.

The transformation washed over me in an icy torrent, twisting and stretching every part of my body, but it was over in an instant, and by the time I crashed head-on into the Hunter's chest, I was staggering forward on my usual two legs.

My staff was clenched in my right hand, right where I'd left it, so as we both staggered back from the collision I shifted my grip and swung it in a vicious, two-handed arc that smacked the last twelve inches of the other end right across the side of Scalyface's neck. He wobbled and roared, swiping at me with his sword hand, but he was even less familiar with the weapon than I'd expected. He wasn't aiming to hit me with the blade. It looked more like he was trying to attack with his claws, having forgotten the sword entirely. I hadn't. I ducked under the clumsy blow and swung my staff again, this time bringing it cracking down across the knuckles of his sword hand.

It flew open on reflex and the stolen sword went clattering across the stone floor. If anything, the loss probably made Scalyface a more dangerous combatant. He lunged into me, both arms sweeping as though to gather me into a bear-hug, and he was much faster without the unfamiliar weapon.

I managed to spin away from one hugely clawed paw, but the other caught me a glancing blow across the shoulder. My duster's armor—magical and mundane both—was more than enough to keep him from cutting into me, but the weight of the impact staggered me to one side.

I caught my balance and swept the end of my staff around once again, driving it down at one of his wide-braced feet. Bones crunched and he howled in surprised agony, loud enough to leave me half deaf.

I probably should have backed off and fried his ass. This Hunter was no more than a minor bully-boy in the supernatural scheme of things, less dangerous than dozens of things I'd fought and (mostly) beaten. One solid burst of flame or force should drop him just as easily as it had killed his flap-cats in the woods.

Maybe that's why I didn't. Or maybe I just gave in to the visceral need to beat the tar out of him for having the gall to pick on a bunch of sweet, innocent little girls. Whatever my reasoning—and I don't always claim to understand it—I didn't bother wasting any more of my magic. Instead, I dug into the icy reserves of the Winter Mantle that coiled deep inside me, summoning both strength and speed beyond the humanly possible.

And I wiped the floor with him.

Don't get me wrong, Scalyface outweighed me by a couple hundred pounds, and would have been most of two feet taller if he could stand up entirely straight. But like most of the true predators of the wild, he had no experience with straight-up, no holds barred fights.

Supernatural predators are generally as vicious as the day is long, tougher and faster healing than you'd believe and more than willing to take a lot of punishment to win a battle. _Natural_ predators don't have those advantages, and in the end that's what Scalyface was. If a lion or a bear gets itself seriously hurt in a fight, whether with an unexpectedly aggressive meal or a rival carnivore, it's most likely going to _die_. So they don't fight all out. If prey is too tough, they give up, and when they fight other predators it's all about dominance games and intimidation.

I fought like a human being. Which is to say dirty, vicious, and totally focused on winning even at the cost of my own pain.

Less than a minute later, the Hunter was lying on his back, moaning pitifully over half a dozen broken bones, with my foot pinning his one functional hand to the floor and the tip of my staff pressed hard against his jugular vein. "Yield," I said, my breath heavy but not ragged. "And I'll still let you live."

He whined softly, like a dog in pain, staring up at me with wide eyes. "Why?" he asked. "You are as much a predator as I. Why do you stand up for these soft, helpless things?"

I rolled my eyes and refrained from pointing out that I was noticeably _better_ at this than him. "Sorry, but as a child of the eighties, I'm pretty sure that I'm contractually obligated to be on the side of the pastel ponies." I shoved the tip of the staff harder into his neck for a moment. "Now are you going to surrender and accept my terms like a good loser, or are you going to make me finish you? Cause I'm getting impatient here."

"_Finish_ him, Sir Harry!"

"You stay out of this, Princess," I called over my shoulder. "We'll deal with your concerns in a minute."

"How dare—!"

I shot her a black look and snapped, "_Don't_ try me right now." Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared, but she held her tongue for the moment.

I turned the same expression on my captive, about to ask again, but he hurried the words out. "I yield. Please let me live, magnificent one."

"You swear to accept my ruling between you and Celestia, and abide by it to the end of your days?"

"Yes. Yes, I swear."

"Good." I let up the pressure on his throat and stepped back to the edge of the dais, well out of reach of even a lunge of those long arms if he happened to be capable of treachery.

I grounded my staff and turned to scan the room, getting my breath back under control. All six of the ponies were right where they'd been before, every one of them plopped down on the floor with their mouths hanging open. The big cats lay quiescent despite their loosened bonds, apparently willing to follow their master's lead. Celestia stood tall in the entryway, her flowing mane a war banner, her elegant face an icy mask.

I hopped lightly down off the dais and scooped up the huge, thorny sword in my free hand. It was way too big for someone my size, more than five feet long and heavier than it looked, but the cold power still running through my veins made it manageable. "Well, here's your real problem," I said, and met Celestia's eyes again. "This thing doesn't belong in your world any more than I do. It's the Earlking's sword." She didn't look enlightened. "A powerful hunter and noble of the fey realms. A lesser peer of my boss's. And since Shecky here couldn't take on _one_ goblin, let alone the goblin king, I'm figuring this was a loan." I gave Scalyface a glare. "Am I right?"

He had collected himself into a slightly less pathetic heap on the floor, his crushed hand tucked in close to his chest. His eyes flicked up to mine and then down again, and he nodded silently.

"Yeah. It's a stretch, but I guess I can see the Earlking sympathizing with your situation here." With a sigh, I let my staff fall back against my shoulder and took the sword in both hands, the better to examine it. "Let's see what we can do about the rest of your subjects, Princess." I let my eyes fall mostly closed and extended my wizard's senses. That same wild, bloodthirsty power still rolled through the weapon, vibrating against my palms, demanding to be used for something—the more violent the better. I brushed aside that seductive tug to examine the sensations of the sword's magic more closely, and soon found what I was looking for. Fine strands of enchantment stretched out from the weapon to all the cat creatures in the room, and more beyond it, scattered all over the forest. Gently, I drew in my magic, almost surprised to feel it gathering in the pit of my stomach and behind my eyes, as it always had before. For half a moment, my bare forehead felt oddly light to me, but I pushed that sensation away as well, and sent my power into the blade, to find and unravel those slender connections.

As soon as I was done, the cats in the room slumped flatter against the floor in a rolling wave, and appeared almost to dissolve as the unnatural forms frayed around them. In just a moment, the room was full of unconscious pegasi draped in loose streamers of rope. A few of them showed nicks and clotted scratches where they'd been caught in my icy cage the day before, but none of them looked any worse off than that.

I lowered the sword and blinked my eyes a couple of times. "Well, that's better anyway. The rest of your co-opted ponies are back to normal as well, Princess, although you might want to send out search parties to bring them home. I—" I twisted around again, giving Scalyface another glare. "Hand over the scabbard, poser-boy." He pulled the sword belt off and handed it over with alacrity, cringing away from touching my hand with what seemed a rather over-dramatic level of submission to me. I sheathed the damned thing and hung the belt over my shoulder, out of the way, then turned back to the silent but increasingly impatient royal. "I'll take care of getting this back to its rightful owner, don't worry about that. And I'll try to make sure this doesn't happen again, although I can't guarantee it."

"That is well, Sir Harry," Celestia said, and it was a wonder her words didn't solidify and shatter on the floor at her feet, they were so icy. "But I am still waiting for you to explain by what right or reason you think you can let this creature live."

I cocked my head slightly, watching the princess for a moment, then strode down the length of the hall until we stood face to face. I was a little surprised to see that without a huge ballroom and grand staircase between us I stood taller than her, my eyes nearly on a level with the tip of her horn. Huh. She'd seemed bigger than that before. Not that it mattered. I'm way taller than Mab too, and you can imagine how much difference that makes in the dynamic of our relationship.

"You really want to know why it's a bad idea?" I asked mildly. "Or do you want to know why you shouldn't kick my ass and do it anyway?"

Her eyes narrowed again, but she stayed silent for a moment, contemplating the difference.

"You know the answer to the second question," I offered, keeping my tone firm but gentle, as though I were explaining to my apprentice an error in logic. "You pointed it out to me when we first met. Direct violence is no more a part of your nature than it is your subjects' and you wouldn't want it any other way." I contained a sigh. "It's part of mine. You don't _want_ to throw down with me, your Highness, and you know it. That's why you asked for my help in the first place. You meant to keep your kingdom and its denizens clear of that taint."

I paused and dragged a hand down my face, coming away with a little blood from the corner of my mouth. "I don't blame you. If I could live as part of such an incredibly well-ordered, peaceful place as you've got going here in Equestria, I'd jump at the chance." Of course, I had to admit privately that I'd most likely go stir crazy in under a month. You get used to a certain regular dosage of adrenalin, it gets hard to give it up.

"As to the reason I'm not going to do it _for_ you," I frowned. "Aside from disliking unnecessary bloodshed myself, that is—I need a map." I glanced around. Twilight and her friends had finally collected themselves, and were doing what they could for the unconscious kidnapees. "Twilight, can you help me out with that?"

The purple unicorn looked up. "What do you need a map of, Sir Harry?"

"The whole world. As big as you've got. Not just Equestria, everything."

She frowned in thought for a moment. "I might—let me see," and she started pulling thick volumes out of her carefully packed saddlebags, one after another. The stack rose higher and higher, nearly to her chin, far more than could _possibly_ have fit inside the small, neat luggage. Hmph. More TARDIS technology. "Yes!" she exclaimed finally, flipping open a huge, aging tome half as big as her. _How did she even get that one_ into _the bag? _Yeesh. I'd be glad to get out of this place, and back to headaches caused by blunt trauma and faerie tinkering instead of rampant violations of basic physics.

Twilight brought the book over to us, and propped it up using Spike's back as a book rest. Celestia lowered her head and I went down on one knee to get a good look. A few pages flipped themselves over until the librarian found a folding plate near the center of the volume. It opened to reveal a gorgeous, medieval style map of an unfamiliar continent shaped, I couldn't help noticing, slightly like a horse's head and neck. I looked it over for a minute. "Okay, Princess, how much of this does Equestria currently encompass?"

"Do you have a quill, Twilight?" The instrument was produced, and the princess gently sketched out the outlines of her territory. It didn't quite take up all of the continent's 'head'.

"Okay, and what size did it used to be, before the whole thing with Luna?"

She had to think harder to recall it, but the final outline was about twice as big, encompassing all of the 'head' but for a forbidding mountain range at the tip of the nose, and extending some distance down the inside of the 'neck'. I contemplated the final product for a while. "So at its largest extent, your kingdom didn't cover quite a quarter of this continent, and its current size is about half that." I met her eyes for a moment. "You don't exactly seem to have an overpopulation problem within your current territory. Even retaking all of the lands that you used to claim is going to tax your resources for decades or generations, depending on how hard you push. Especially given how time-intensive close control of the weather and seasons seems to be. Am I right?"

She let out a heavy breath—just a hair too delicately feminine to qualify as a snort, but somewhere in that neighborhood—and nodded her head reluctantly. "Yes, that's about correct. I still don't see how this connects to not getting rid of that awful _thing_."

"That 'awful thing' represents the balance of nature when it's outside of your ponies' control. You know that don't you?" I asked gently. "As ugly as it seems from outside, there's a delicate balancing act between predator and prey in the unmodified world. If all the predators on the planet suddenly stopped eating prey animals, and started sharing the plant food supply with them, without your subjects' careful husbandry to keep them in check, they'd first overpopulate and then starve. _All_ of them. The carnage would be _worlds_ worse than the way it works now. Can you see that?"

Celestia turned her head away, her expression weary. She was silent for a long while. "Yes, Wizard. I see your point." After another moment, she shook herself and raised her head again, regal and collected as ever. "So what solution do you propose?"


	11. Chapter 11

**New Beginnings**

"Well, that could have gone better," I muttered, leaning heavily on my staff as I stumped down the ancient steps behind Twilight and her friends.

Once the tempers were cooled, the negotiations had turned from tense to tedious, but I was not the most relieved when an agreement was finally reached, shaken on, (most briefly) and the Hunter seen off into the twilight forest. If anything, the princess's attitude toward me turned even frostier once he was gone, but I couldn't exactly blame her. No one enjoys the realization that bringing in a tiger to deal with your rat problem wasn't such a good idea after all.

Behind us, a near-constant stream of pretty white pegasi in shiny golden armor were coming and going from both entries to the high tower room. In a fit of practicality, Celestia had chosen to coordinate the search-and-rescue for the rest of her lost subjects from there. I'd offered her what specifics of their location I had gleaned from the unraveled shapeshifting spells as a feeble sort of olive branch, and she had accepted the information with what looked to be the last bit of grace she was willing to offer me. Once I was done, she'd told Twilight, in no uncertain terms, to "get the wizard out of here now, before he does any more damage," which I felt was just a little unfair, but I held my tongue. Apparently another hall of the ancient castle contained a magical circle much like the one they had used to bring me here in the first place, so we wouldn't even have to leave the forest again before they ejected me from their world.

I suppose I should have been relieved.

Despite my lagging steps, we arrived at our destination very soon. Twilight hunted out the circle in the center of the big room—which unlike the ones we'd been in earlier was little more than a flattened spot in the rampant shrubbery—and started cleaning it up for use. I hovered uncomfortably at the edge of the space, finding it hard to cope with standing up straight again.

Applejack and Pinkie Pie pitched in with the cleaning once they saw what their friend was up to, and in no time all the space within the golden circle and a couple of feet all around it were practically polished to a high gloss. Rarity watched them work from a safe distance, while the two pegasi loitered near me, looking uncomfortable.

As Twilight's helpers moved away from her work area and she started laying out her props again, I began to approach her, but before I'd taken a step, Rainbow Dash blurted, "So, Harry," I turned to her and waited patiently. She rubbed one fore-hoof against the back of her neck in an awkward, "I'm a jock so I don't know how to talk about feelings" kind of gesture, and went on, "I—Thanks."

I raised an eyebrow and said, "Didn't we already cover that? We're good."

"No. Not for saving us. That's covered. For—" she hesitated, and tossed her head back toward the busy tower. "For that. 'Cause Celestia didn't think to say it, and I thought you should know that we…we appreciate what you did. Even if it's not perfect."

I frowned. Fluttershy, who had been watching both of us very carefully through this exchange, piped up softly, "Yes. Thank you, Sir Harry, for making things come out better than they might have."

Why did both of them seem so uncomfortable? Maybe it was me. They hadn't had much chance to get used to my un-pony-like appearance, after all. But I didn't think that was all of it. Then it hit me. "You haven't seen your princess really angry very often, have you?"

They both startled a little at the question, then Fluttershy looked away—her long mane concealing her face—and Rainbow Dash pawed uncomfortably at the ground before her. "No," she admitted after a moment. "Not really. Not like that. I'm glad you kept her from doing something she'd regret."

"Me too." I coughed. "Consider yourselves welcome."

"Sir Harry?" Rarity's elegant, civilized voice was almost as diffident as her pink-maned friend's.

I dropped to one knee as she approached, feeling as though my height were somehow an insult to proper decorum in her presence. "Yes?" I asked.

"Did you truly mean what you said to Celestia?"

"Which part?" I asked.

"About wanting to stay here, if you could?"

I frowned, thinking about it for a moment. Did I? "Yes. At least in part. You've got a good thing going here. I hope you realize that." I shrugged uncomfortably. "But I wouldn't fit in. Not least because things would never really be square between me and your ruler. And there are a lot of people back home depending on me." _Plus, I've only been here two days, and I'm already dying for a steak sandwich._ "But it's okay. I'm leaving Equestria in good hands."

"Yeah, the Princess knows what she's doing," Rainbow asserted.

"Heh. Silly pony. I meant yours." I shifted my staff to my left hand and held out my right to the zippy pegasus.

She hardly hesitated at all before she put her hoof in it and shook firmly. "Of course you did!" she said. "Together, the six of us can do anything!"

"I think you're right." Grinning, I offered my hand to Fluttershy next. She barely touched it with hers, but then surprised me completely by leaning in to give me a peck on the cheek, light and brief as the brush of a butterfly's wing. I held perfectly still, grinning like an idiot, until she pulled back, then turned to Rarity. She placed her hoof daintily in my palm, and I raised it gently to my lips, just like a good storybook knight.

Applejack and Pinkie Pie had walked up while that was going on, and the cowgirl pony stepped up next, grabbing my hand in both fore-hooves and pumping my arm so hard she nearly shook something loose in my elbow. "It was mighty fine meetin' ya'll, Harry. An' thanks fer ever'thang!"

"The same to you, Applejack," I said, when I finally managed to extract my paw from her grip. "And thank you too."

Pinkie Pie wasn't going to be upstaged by anybody. No sooner had I gotten away from Applejack than I found myself being hugged to within an inch of my life. "You were the coolest, Harry! I had a great time hanging out with you!"

"Even all the times you nearly got killed?" I asked incredulously.

Behind me, there was a sharp snort from Rainbow Dash.

"Of _course_, silly willy! Those were the _best!_ It's gonna be seriously boring around here without you, or that yellow guy, or Discord."

"Pin-_kie!_" the rest of them chorused.

"I have a feeling you'll find some way to stay entertained," I told her.

"I'm ready whenever you are, Sir Harry," Twilight called from her station in the middle of the crumbled room.

"Yeah," I said, lumbering back to my feet. "No point putting it off, eh?"

Her circle was prepared; six candles and six focus items laid out around the intricate inscriptions. "Huh," I muttered, considering the formerly inexplicable collection of objects. "They represent the six of you, don't they?"

"Of course. Friendship is magic. And my magic is inextricably tied to my friends." Twilight blinked up at me. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

I nodded acknowledgment of that, and knelt once more to offer her my hand as well. Her shake was firm and calm. "Of course not," I said. "I'm very glad to have met you, Twilight. And your friends. And I hope you never need my help again. But if you do, know that I'll give it, no question."

"I know. You're our friend too." And with that, she turned away and began the travel spell. It came together in a matter of moments here, the purple-white dome reforming just as I'd seen it before, echoing the brilliant light of her horn.

I stood up, rubbing at the middle of my forehead, and strode through without a backward glance.

ooOoo

The sun was just as brilliant in the parking lot behind my office as it had been when I left. In fact, it looked as though no more than a couple of hours had gone by. "Huh. Figures the time difference would only run in a useful direction when I didn't need it to," I muttered. "Hey, Clyde, you miss me?"

The faerie steed was waiting patiently where I left him, returned to his shiny white Dodge Charger look, and only responded with a short, sharp noise halfway between a horse's snort and a big-block engine revving. "Yeah, that's what I thought," I answered, as if I had any idea what he'd really meant. I swung open his driver's door, letting the Earlking's heavy black sword slide off my shoulder finally, and leaning in to set it on the floor, against the passenger's seat. "Well, we've got a little errand to run back to mommy dearest's court, it looks like. I think I'll let her decide how best to get this thing back to its rightful owner." Mab would probably have some sneaky, convoluted arrangement all set up to get as much diplomatic leverage out of the Goblin King as she could in doing so. I'd leave her to it. I had no desire at all to run across that particular hunter again, under _any_ circumstances.

I was about to swing myself into Clyde's seat when a familiar, throaty roar cut through the morning quiet, approaching quickly. I stood back up. "Hmm. Change of plan, maybe."

Sure enough, a moment later a small woman in black leathers on a black Harley rolled up into the lot, and glided to a smooth stop in front of me. She cut the engine and pulled off her black helmet, revealing bright blue eyes and a short brush of golden blonde hair framing a cute cheerleader's face.

"Heya, Murph!" I greeted her.

"Hi, Harry. You free? There's something I could use your help with down at headquarters."

"Sure, no problem. You just caught me. I'll follow you."

She paused, looking me up and down. "You look pretty beat for this early in the day. What have you been up to?"

I smirked at her. "Oh, you know. Just horsing around."

She nodded acceptingly and I turned to climb into the car. From behind me I heard, "Is that why you have a 'Kick Me' sign on your back?"

FIN


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